ORBIT
Home—died on January 12, 2013. The
first of four moves means the boxes were
still optimistic that they would be opened.
They were still stiff, arrogant about their
new shape, flatness just a memory. At my
mother’s new house in our neighborhood,
my father on one of his obsessive walks,
found the one old Chinese person, a bony
lady with branches for teeth, the kind of
woman my mother would normally shun.
She visited my mother every day for a year.
One day, she brought oranges. The next,
green vegetables from a Chinese farmer.
My father left them to speak in Chinese
as he wandered the neighborhood so he
wouldn’t die. The lady swore at my father
in Chinese. Called him stupid. A fool.
At the funeral, she said, God brought me
here to help your mother. And it struck
me. My father’s words were an umbrella
that couldn’t open. My mother held the
umbrella, refused to let the wind take
it. And this old woman was the wind.
THE HEAD
The Head—died on August 3, 2015.
When the two men finally came, they
rolled a gurney into the other room,
hushed talking and noises, then the tip
of the gurney came out like a cruise ship.
They were worried about dinging the
walls. My mother’s whole body covered
with a blanket. Her head gone. Her
face gone. Rilke was wrong. The body is
nothing without the head. My mother,
now covered was no longer my mother.
A covered apple is no longer an apple.
A sketch of a person isn’t the person.
Somewhere, in the morning, my mother
had become the sketch. And I would
spend the rest of my life trying to shade
her back in.
Victoria Chang’s new book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and lives in Los Angeles and is a Core Faculty member within Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program.
Photo by Rogério Martins from Pexels.