tsarina

        Wendy Chin-Tanner            

        IN THE DUTCH HOUSE

           I do not want to say
           that I was hungry for affection
           in that house
           where the blare of the television hid nothing
           and the eyes of the bloated goldfish
           were glazed with rheum,
           but I was.
           And I would like to say
           that my bearing was filial
           and compassionate and kind,
           but that would be a lie.

           Cigarette burns peppered the carpets
           and each day we put out small fires
           and we put away the sharp things
           after he came at her once with a pair of scissors,
           lurching forward on his cane and his spindly legs.

           What are the facts that should be tallied
           to account the sum of a man?
           That he had beat his wife and sometimes his children,
           but was fond of babies and teasing?
           That he'd fought the dogs his sons had raised as pets,
           but had saved from the Communists a collection of rare scrolls?
           That though he read the classics,
           he pissed on the toilet seat and shat in his pants
           and shook his penis in the hallway
           out of rage and dementia and frustration?

           She would bathe him then with damp rags
           as he wept with his bald head bowed.
           The brown age spots spread like continents,
           and for all her invectives,
           she was pleased with his wretchedness,
           for now she finally had him
           and knew he could never leave her.
           Is there not some kind of beauty in this,
           in how the hard weaknesses of life
           might be sometimes bound to love?

           In the garden with him
            the autumn before the end began,
           I raked the leaves that fell from the tall oak tree
           and despite the neighbors' warnings,
            he burned them in the tin tofu bin
           where the spirit money and joss papers
           were burned for luck.
            Beneath a cluster of leaves
           I overturned a pigeon's corpse,
           flattened, already decomposing.
            I thought that we might bury it,
            but he threw it onto the illegal fire
           and the stench of the smoldering, putrid feathers
           drove me indoors,
           nostrils and eyelids burning,
           as the thick black smoke
            curled up to the heavens
           beyond the Brooklyn sky.