Too Many Ancestors      (Sacramento, 17 Oct 1989)

It seems that
On the day of
Of Father-in-Law's death
There was one too many ancestors
Crowded together on the roof
Of the Celestial Firmament.

Predictably, it fell in upon us,
The ghostly tiles raining
Down to drown our ensuing days
In lugubrious and
Myriad perplexities.

Suddenly confronted
With a yawning eternity
That filled the vacuum left
By the spirit of his august
Departed person,
I spent a sadly
Deepened afternoon
Poking through the books
And other earthly debris
Which filled his mysterious
And until recently
Largely unknown
Living spaces.

Like some private investigator
Of missing personalities,
I sifted carefully through
The shards and remnants
Of his mortal life,
Hoping for a few clues
To his personal
Understanding
Of what it's
All about.

And found myself
Profoundly embarrassed
By my uninvited
And unwilling intrusion
Into his compelling character,
Formed from the raw Earth
Of Chinese and American
Homelands.

None of the immediate family
(And there were quite a few)
wanted the onerous task
Of boxing books, sorting through
Memoranda and small keepsakes,
Hence the convenience
Of a 'honkie Coolie's' labor
Handily on-tap
Through the curious,
If begrudged,
Convenience
Of a marriage!

Three boxes sufficed
For my task of boxing books:.
One for Chinese language,
One for English language,
And a much larger third,
Despite the yawning emptiness
That it contained.
Into it went all
The painfully personal
Memories and small moments
Of this father
Of my new wife.

As his life unfolded
In its paper chroncles of
Personal experiences
And cherished dreams,
I found a melancholia
Of the bleakest sort
Drifting down
Like prematurely chill snow
In late September
To translocate my thoughts
Into regions of
Blackest and eternal
Anaesthesia.

Numbness at last
Stilled my motion
Until I was struck,
Suddenly and completely dumb
By two oddly parallel
But disconnected thoughts.

The old  'Lo Gung'  was gone.
Only his small hoard
Of published and collected wisdom
Connecting two worlds
Remained to serve
As sentinel heralds
To his passing
And soujorn wandering
Through this painfully
Brief and fragile
Wordly phase
Of emptiness.

I recalled the fact, just then,
That my own home
Was similarly choked
With useless books,
Half of which I would
Never read,
And other minutae
That some future and
Equally unwilling person
Or total stranger
Would soon
Have to similarly
Perform
Last inventorial
Rites upon.

But I also reflected
Upon a moment from
My own childhood
That had left a bitter,
Scorching memory
Upon my puerile and
Not yet wholly formed
Awarenesses,
Many years before.

An old man, childless and
Living alone in his lonely old
Gothic monster of a house,
Had died just down the street
From us one afternoon.
No one in his family was left
To note his passing
Until finally...a neighbor
Knocking at his daunting doorway
smelt the hellish, sweet odor
of ultimate corporeal
Diminishment,
Roiling up
From under the door frame
And notified the authorities
That 'something' had died.

After his body
Had been taken away
(I was too young to
Understand all the details
At the time)
The great, cavernous rooms
Of his house sat empty of life;
All that remained of him
were many boxes of personal
Photographs and memories
Captured during the apex
Of his life and fixed forever
On emulsed paper.
His life, his family
And all the frozen moments
That comprised the exuberance
Of his equally brief
Earthly transit.

And so those boxes waited there,
Untouched for some time,
Since there was no one left
To come and recover
These priceless grains of
Experiential sand
That formed the desert dunes
Of his transtory existance.

The children
Of my neighborhood
Were of course heartless,
Vicious little beasts,
Typical of all uninstructed little boys
And grown men everywhere.
Finally a group of them,
Having overcome the morbid
But thrilling aura of
The forbidding old house,
Broke in and went berserk,
Scattering the contents
Of all the boxes
Of personal papers and images
Throughout the empty lots
Surrounding that austere
Old edifice.
A lifetime of frozen memories;
Strewn with unthinking innocence,
upon the cold, damp
October earth...

It rained
shortly thereafter
For almost a full week,
As if the Heavens themselves
Mourned the sight of
Such heartless futility.

On the second day
Of that rupture of clouds
I ventured out of our house,
And walked over to
The old mansion.
The papers and photos lay
Like so many clumps
Of strangely resistant
And unmelting snow,
As the incessant downpour
Gradually pounded them
To blobs of pulp,
Showing no mercy,
Into bleak and forlorn
scraps of paper,
Returning them
To their basic element.

Childish myself then and
Unknowing even at that time
Of my own father's recent passing
Just two years before,
I recall simply having been filled
With a devastating,
Inutterable sense of remorse
Over the tragic fate
Of that lonely old man...
His whole lifetime of hope and human
Aspirations had met their bitter
End upon the muddy ground
Of the old man's yard.

That same banshee wail of silent
Agony that rose from those memories
Of childhood now screamed anew
within me, confronted by my task,
As I filled box after box
With my Faither-in-Law's books.

That terrible shadow remains.
Its ghastly melody fliting through
The shadows of my own study
Each time I sit, trying
To read my own books
Or write...