曙光

Father said 曙光 is my uncle, his name means the flush of dawn,

the pink that stains the sky’s edge before the sun climbs high enough to burn it white.

I wonder who he is, this uncle I never saw, whose shadow never fell across the doorway

of the old house, who never sat at our table, never left a chair behind to miss.

Father said he was twenty-six, forever twenty-six. it's fixed, photograph left too long in sun until the

edges curl but the face won't change.

His name like wind in the house, sometimes leaking through fragmented sobs behind the

cracky door, heard it in the confusion during spring festival—

hello to the eldest, skip the middle, then it’s my father—

A blindness who slipped between names.

When yearly subsidy arrive the first day of a new year, reward for a police killed,

how thin it can’t carry tears,

the third-class merit medal breathes at the bottom of the

closet leaning against the wall.

The story has an age now, thirty years old, older than he ever got, the road folded him into the bus,

the bus folded him into the asphalt, the asphalt gave back ashes.

His fiancée standing somewhere in that crowd, and what remained, not a self, but gold, silver, cash,

letters the bride price traveling backward, her house to his.

They burned his wedding suit at his grave, and the wedding with it,

both becoming the same gray dust that settles on headstones and doesn't wash off.

I dream of my grandparents, their face still bright with the colors of being young,

turning to depth like ocean water and sinks into a hollow fills with salt.

My father rides his bicycle from the work unit toward a train station, wind mixing tears with grit

until his face is a map of that day, and he's still riding it for thirty years.

And my grandparents carried him into their nineties, learning that a son's leaving isn't a storm

that passes but a wetness that seeps into everything—

into the kitchen where his bowl was never set, into the darkest hours when sleep won't come, into

ordinary days that crack open.

dampness that won't dry, and that small storms keep blowing through.