Failure

This is the poem I cannot write.

My father, what you would call
a self-made man, met my mother
while he was off-duty:

a café with cheap European décor
in a South Korean port city;
three men and three women
around the table, young,
each hoping, waiting, eying.

The women spun a fork
to decide the evening’s fate.
How does one distinguish
fate from chance, when it’s
the shape of a fork? He
had a full head of hair then,
caught with an awkward smile
in the eye of a camera.

I remember being
nestled on his stomach, him
napping on the sofa, my child's body
swaying to the movements of his breathing.
There was a sound
I could hear from inside of him,
a kind of murmur, an umbral
lullaby. I slept
the sleep of the dead.

Was that love?

After forty years of life,
after a wife and two children
and an apartment in the capital,
he was unable to accept that
things have many names, and
names, many meanings. So when
love came as forgiveness,
the graceful pity in mother’s eyes,
he could not unfurl his fist. Such
things he failed to understand.

In Korean, love is sarang.
It shares its etymology with
flesh, life, and knowing.

I never knew my father
beyond the warmth of his belly,
the music in his innards
that lulled me to an undreaming
childhood. Now I dream
of the fist, the heaviness
of its judgement,
the unspoken words
smouldering in my bones
like some secret fire…

Some people
are like trees burning
with a holy flame;
they run through the forest
setting everyone
they touch for comfort
ablaze.

I wanted to exhume
the childhood
I am surviving.

Let this be a funeral of sort.

I spread now these words
like dirt over a burning heart,
to bury its broken music
the failure I am meant for
lovingly.