Personal Best

The Clock

The Clock—died on June 24, 2009 and

it was untimely.  How many times my

father has failed the clock test.  Once I

heard a scientist with Alzheimer’s on

the radio, trying to figure out why he

could no longer draw a clock.  It had to

do with the superposition of three types. 

The hours represented by 1—12, the

minutes where a 1 no longer represents

1 but 5, and a 2 now represents 10, then

the second hand that measures 1 to 60. 

I sat at the stoplight and thought of the

clock, its perfect circle and its

superpositions, all the layers of

complication on a plane of thought, yet

the healthy read the clock in one single

instant without a second thought.  I

think about my father and his lack of

first thoughts, how every thought is a

second or third or fourth thought,

unable to locate the first most important

thought.  I wonder about the man on the

radio and how far his brain has

degenerated since.  Marvel at how far

our brains allow language to wander

without looking back but knowing

where the pier is.  If you unfold an

origami swan, and flatten the paper,

is the paper sad because it has seen the

shape of the swan or does it aspire

towards flatness, a life without creases? 

My father is the paper.  He remembers

the swan but can’t name it.  He no

longer knows the paper swan represents

an animal swan.  His brain is the water

the animal swan once swam in, holds

everything, but when thawed, all the

fish disappear.  Most of the words we

say have something to do with fish. 

And when they’re gone, they’re gone.

*

from Victoria Chang's Essay on "Clocks"

In retrospect, perhaps my initial resistance to writing about my mother’s death was a resistance to the elegy because I felt that everyone had already done it better than I ever could, and elegies didn’t feel quite right for my own grieving process or grieving experience. My obits more aptly capture the fragmented nature of my own grief. They also seem more anti-sentimental, anti-celebratory, and perhaps rooted more in philosophy than praise, song, or lament. In this way, my obits feel culturally different to me—they feel like more of a Chinese American experience of grieving and grief.

The poet Matthew Zapruder once said to me that my obit poems “show your thinking” and I think that best encapsulates the process of writing these poems. The thinking mind is rarely linear--it branches, then branches off of the branch, and then off of that branch, then sometimes like a little bee, thinking jumps from branch to branch, flower to flower, tree to tree, and suddenly, the writer is like a drunk bee, buzzing around on a warm spring day, unsure of where she is or where she started, but feeling full, but unlike a bee, poems (at least mine) don’t need to end up at the hive or where they began.