Grandma's Hands

These are the hands

always holding each other.

Folding and unfolding

in each other's palm --

a white hair, a story, or a twig.

Like the life lines

twined and untwined --

Always a secret

written between

the right palm and the left palm.

These are the hands

That said, How cold !

And cupped my hands

when I shivered.

These hands are made of bones

attached to the skins --

filled with dishes, wrinkles, and other hands.

These hands

scrub the floor, wipe our tears, and hold a prayer.

Time and time

again the hands say,

I will let you go.

And then remind me,

Don't turn your head.

Each time

the hands hold me closer

by letting go.

These are the hands

visible and invisible

which connect

a distance

between a small room on Long Island and a grave

in Hong Kong.

These hands reach out from

the breeze

to touch me

without asking.

These hands reached out from

a bed

in an I.C.U.

and said, Go home, you are hungry.

I asked the hands,

Don't you want me to stay with you ?

The hands were in silence.

One evening, I heard the hands

murmur in a dream

Ah mo ! Ah mo !

I asked,

What is it ?

My mother said,

This is how your grandma calls her mother.

1988, Long Island, New York

Downpour

As the downpour washes the moutains

into a painting

We follow the rhythm of rain

into millennia of paths

that bring us together.

Tonight, Maria sits by the window

to rub her eyes and make sure

it is just the rain

that blurs her vision.

Back at home, she never cries.

We are just carried away by the rain:

Different time or colors

now look similar.

The mountains, the rivers, the memories,

and many interpretations

of a painting, are rising

from far to near.

We listen to different versions of rains:

It looks like the vineyard in Sicily

where hundreds of folks came to a reading

by an American author. They may not understand

English, but the rain.....

He sinks behind the screen of rain, and she rises:

It's like the rain of bullets on the walls

in North East China during the Japanese war

which filled pages of .....

The rain beats the windows harder:

Like the tears of the Russian Jew,

after hundreds of years, still

exile with rain.......

What seems strange in other countries

now becomes familiar,

The rain has no brain to discriminate

the boundaries of nationalities

but fall into everyone's eyes

without announcing

the arrival or departure

of feelings.

From the roots transplanted

it may or may not grow:

in different climate

being neglected,

over or under ferterlized,

drought or flood.

All because of the lack of planning

of rain.

We don't plan to read tonight.

Just our hearts are pouring out

with the float of

neither tears nor rain.

It must be something more

than the beginning of

downpour.

1989, Massachusset at a poetry reading