The Innisfree Poetry Journal
www.innisfreepoetry.org
by Norma Chapman
HONEY DON’T
The trout that yesterday muscled through water lies headless on my plate. Your bare stick
dances to a fusion beat while I grow old in Aunt Bebe's rocking chair.
Honey, don't fall like water. Honey, don't sing so loud.
On old bodies, buttocks hang like soft leather pouches.
I might as well bite the poison apple and forget the prince. He isn't coming anyway.
Oh, Honey, don't fall like water. Oh, Honey, don't sing so loud.
FIRST LANGUAGE
Before his second birthday the membrane of diphtheria nearly closed his mouth for good. His parents, carriers of salvation to the Japanese,
dedicated their son to God in gratitude but committed the care of his body to their servant, San Ji-Ki San. She washed his skin and talked to him in Japanese.
Every night, through his closed bedroom door, he heard his mother singing hymns in her lush contralto voice. He knew she stood in the hallway brushing her dark hair.
Every morning, except Sunday, she slept off a hangover of all-night prayer. No one went near her. When he was six, San Ji-Ki San told him it was time
to eat dinner with his parents. At table, they spoke to each other, never to him. He didn’t understand a word they said, however much he watched his mother’s lips.
He longed for his nursery suppers, eating fish and rice with polished bamboo hashi and hearing about the boy who sprouted from a peach seed to become a Samurai.
One night after dinner, when a visiting missionary asked him a question in English, He made no reply. His mother turned the color of skimmed milk.
She pulled him to her bedroom, pushed aside the visitors’ coats and spanked him with her brush until he cried. He asked in Japanese “What did I do?”
*
When he was 60, he learned his mother was dying in Oakland, California. He packed a bag with pictures of San Ji-Ki San and his Japanese story books. He told
no one where he was going. In Maine, he watched the winter waves and remembered Hokkaido’s northern coast. He read again the stories of his childhood
and he thought in Japanese. He tried not to think of coffins, of San Ji-Ki San’s a decade before, or his mother’s, soon to be surrounded by baskets
of lilies, the family, and a Presbyterian minister praising her life. The congregation would sing hymns she had sung in the hallway of their Hokkaido house.
Nor did he wish to consider the family’s anger toward him, he who was once pulled from death by his mother’s prayers, now unforgiven,
ears and mouth closed to the language of God.
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