February 2018 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews by Grace Cavalieri • Washington Independent Review of Books

Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater by Sam Roxas-Chua. Lithic Press. 85 pages.

Poet Joseph Stroud says these poems “will take you on a journey to where you have never been before.” This is true and it’s miraculous, for all of us to have the same words in English — yet a poet can, by virtue of his fantastic vision, combine them magically. Roxas-Chua is dreamlike, mythic, imagistic, bringing forth spirits from his ancestral China and the Philippines. All poetry is made of mystery but this poet transports us to a realm that is both primitive and exalted. There’s a ritual of the mind, as well as a boy inside a man, who speaks a vivid language in After His Great Fires: “…Death’s gift/is in the lifting/of limbs, of forearms, /strong like the breast/of a horse carrying/a boy on its back —/its muscles and chambers/moving the clack/of his skeleton, echoing in/the interior of a boy whose/mind like a carousel spins/against a reflection/of mad ghosts in odd/shaped mirrors.”

The father figure features predominantly in his work as a source of energy and the inequities of childhood — not forgiveness and reconciliation but something more like longing and remorse. There’s a beautiful haunting we’ve not seen exactly like this before and may not until he writes again. I wish to focus on this. The same poem (“After His Great Fires”) begins, “When my father turns his wrists/to unbutton his flannel sleeves, /I pull half the world like a mule/and sing diphthongs/ to a somnambulist God/who failed my father, /my drum, my bakunawa, /neighing — tied against/the great catalpa/where he left me his shirt, /his flannel shirt/that I inhale to believe that I am a boy:/ a bastard a bastinado, a dab/ of blood in his compass…”

And in “The Adoration & Mystery of The Fifth Thorn,” he writes: “The sound of early footsteps/presses against the wood, it is my father, //light in his substance now — little tides/under his translucent feet. An inch//is all I saw of his levitation/to the kitchen, to the back door, //to the flat chest of the yard/where I once hug on to him, //cheek on the back of his neck —/my first nosebleed//coating the white cotton of his starched collar.…”

See the poem “After the Carnival”: “I carry you, /my Strongest Man in the World, //your bloated stomach on my back —/our beard songs so beautiful//tonight — I walk home. /Father, I didn’t mind the mud//or the breaking of illuminated creatures/under my boots.… I never did close your eyes//when I sold you to the seas. Never did I take a sea palm// …/Tonight, // our fealty belongs to the sirens, /their long hair — our beds, //Their hands of soft ambulances/stitching the silver lines//back into your graying eyes.”

Roxas-Chua is also a visual artist and I believe this with all my heart.

Papel

Last night I watched my mother

milk a memory into a letter.

The fading days are here,

fiddleheads are falling

from her silver hair,

umber stems are crawling out

of her mouth as she coughs

into a pillow.

Her bed, a brittle star.

Her hands, light —

the paltry soul of paper.

Her eyes are vellum coffins

dimming in the whirl

of a lifeline.

She sleeps with folded hands —

a dorsal.

Our dancing days are over,

my hands are ledges,

my fingers drink from a bleed

in the oyster.