Emily Tian
The man sitting over there,
the one going bald, with a soft belly,
how was he to know he would lose
the face everyone kept pictures of?
He keeps some of his own,
each a sort of surrogate mother from which
he tells himself about himself.
When he was young he liked to work
with his hands: he thought it important
to touch the earth and good
to burn the back of his neck.
He would come home to a pot of soaked beans,
old papers knobbed with blue paint …
he has to guess the rest, filling in
what must have thrilled him,
what people said without his knowing.
Recently, he was just about knocked over
trying to tabulate the hours
spent in bed, sitting over the toilet,
vacuuming the floor, waiting for friends —
so as to cut them loose and
look for the hard black kernel of life.