I remember how she rewound the VHS <\/p>\n for E.M. and E. C.C.<\/em><\/p>\n and the breeze that salts the air LIGHT AND YEARS I remember how she rewound the VHS each time I pleaded to see the Falcon sail free from a dead star\u2019s fiery pointillism. Or, how he leaned back, answered, We waited for it to end, when I asked, What did you do in the camp? Years later, it\u2019s difficult to say who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":256,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[351,353],"tags":[355],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\neach time I pleaded to see the Falcon
\nsail free from a dead star\u2019s fiery pointillism.
\nOr, how he leaned back, answered, We waited for it to end<\/em>,
\nwhen I asked, What did you do in the camp<\/em>?
\nYears later, it\u2019s difficult to say who
\nfirst described the midnight funerals,
\nthe way, once stoked, rows of tarpaper shacks roiled
\nin recollection like sap boiling beneath its grain,
\nthe black hole of a body unbodied by heat.
\nNeither knew the names of the deceased.
\nWhat did they feel, then, watching again and again
\nas the sky bowed its damp forehead to the flames
\nto receive a whisper\u2014wind unfurling
\nbirch-bark in striated swathes of white.
\nFor a cheek\u2019s burst capillaries, glaucoma\u2019s blizzard
\nin an eye, conjure old memories embering
\nolder worlds, constellations burnt out
\nbefore we see them. Still, we see them.
\nI couldn\u2019t wait to unwrap the blistered
\ncellophane: a foil-lit galaxy\u2019s crystal stippling,
\nthe rock salt that flecked the frozen asphalt
\nof their South Vancouver home. Patience,
\npatience<\/em>\u2014then a sidereal scroll of names and places
\nI couldn\u2019t read flashed past their hands
\nknotted atop the couch cushions\u2014mine
\nknuckled pallid during that final scene
\nwhere dead fathers, living daughters, and unborn sons
\nwait by the fire for an obsidian mask
\nto fill with ash. Difficult to say
\nwe watched it again and again.<\/p>\nMUTE SWANS, YELLOW IRISES<\/h5>\n
\nwith a storm\u2019s ionic aftertaste. Along
\nthe boardwalk\u2019s nautilus, tourists pin themselves to the clouds
\non selfie sticks. Beneath, runoff
\nfrom the tankers slakes the pier
\nwith sulphur rot. Sulphur
\nin the river. Sulphur plumbing the bones
\nof the birds shipped in crates from across the sea. The flowers,
\ntoo, were brought here: they survive
\nin brackish water, secrete
\na resin that burns skin\u2014light
\ndarkening a darkroom\u2019s silvered paper,
\nor this print in which my grandfather presses to his mother\u2019s
\ndress in a too-large Sunday suit.
\nThe flock\u2019s wings were first
\nclipped before the War.
\nNow, flash-floods swallow
\nshallow nests, and twice a year I return for family, for friends,
\nfor faces dissolved in vistas mostly water\u2014
\nsee both wave and body swell,
\nthen cease. The New Year
\ncurls in the bud of the Old. There is a song
\nthat begins less lonely less<\/em>\u2014another that ends it doesn\u2019t matter<\/em>.
\nWhat else did he mutter that night we flung
\nour bottles into the delta\u2019s froth?
\nThey glowed like seiners
\nthrough the fog. Night merges
\nthe river with the mainland. Cygnets unreel snails from shells,
\nstrip stalks to their wet marrow.
\nI watch the late-season
\nblossoms blister and fall:
\npaper lanterns on the tide, the breakers
\ncresting in my grandfather\u2019s eyes. He regards the lens like a door
\nshut suddenly by wind. The irises anchor their fronds
\namong the driftwood. They hold on
\nas he once held both his mother
\nand another, severed by the frame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"