Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

How else do we return to ourselves but to fold The page so it points to the good part

childhood is only a cage that widens

to leap from the bridge I’ve made of my wrongs

Can you believe my uncle worked at the Colt factory for fifteen years only to use a belt at the end?

Because what I did with my one short beautiful life— was lose it on a winning streak.

Sara I messed up I’m trying to stay clean but my hands are monsters who believe in magic

your aunt Rose gone two years now like a trick they forgot to finish

Words, the prophets tell us, destroy nothing they can’t rebuild.

When they ask me what it’s like, I tell them imagine being born in a hospice in flames.

I guess what I mean is that I ate the apple not because the man lied when he said I was born of his rib but that I wanted to fill myself with its hunger for the ground, where the bones of my people still dream of me.

I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.

My favorite kind of darkness is the one inside us, I want to tell him.

Given another chance, I’d pick the life where I play the piano in a room with no roof. Broken keys, Bach sonata like footsteps fast down the stairs as my father chases my mother through New England’s endless leaves.

Maybe, like you, I was one of those people who loves the world most when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere.

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in a storm.

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold. Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu. And the word for weakness is Yếu. How you say what you mean changes what you say.

I am wrong often—but not enough to forget you.

I come from a people of sculptors whose masterpiece was rubble.