October leaves coming down, as if called.
Morning fog through the wildrye beyond the train tracks.
A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family sleeps.
That I woke at all & the hawk up there thought nothing of its wings.
That I snuck onto the page while the guards were shitfaced on codeine.
That I read my books by the light of riotfire.
That my best words came farthest from myself & it’s awesome.
That you can blow a man & your voice speaks through his voice.
Like Jonah through the whale.
Because a blade of brown rye, multiplied by thousands, makes a purple field.
Because this mess I made I made with love.
Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured.
Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.
Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.
Because I made a promise.
That the McDonald’s arch, glimpsed from the 2 am rehab window off Chestnut, was enough.
That mercy is small but the earth is smaller.
Summer rain hitting Peter’s bare shoulders.
The ptptptptptptpt of it.
Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.
Because this body is my last address.
Because right now, just before morning, when it’s blood-blue & the terror incumbent.
Because the sound of bike spokes heading home at dawn was unbearable.
Because the hills keep burning in California.
Through red smoke, singing. Through the singing, a way out.
Because only music rhymes with music.
The words I’ve yet to use: timothy grass, jeffrey pine, celloing, cocksure, light-lusty, midnight-green, gentled, water-thin, lord (as verb), russet, pewter, lobotomy.
The night’s worth of dust on his upper lip.
Barnjoy on the cusp of winter.
The broken piano under a bridge in Windsor that sounds like footsteps when you play it.
The Sharpied sign outside the foreclosed house:
SEEKING CAT FRIEND. PLEASE KNOCK FOR KAYLA.
The train whistle heard through an opened window after a nightmare.
My mother, standing at the mirror, putting on blush before heading to chemo.
Sleeping in the back seat, leaving the town that broke me, whole.
Early snow falling from a clear, blushed sky.
As if called.
Copyright © 2022 by Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother, Penguin Books
