Poetry: “Untitled”

By Joanna Ngai, 19
Washington

Photo by Taylor Baker, 18
South Carolina

1.

I think not anything
Has the power of music
It is words set to a heartbeat,
Known when we look over our shoulder
Wondering what was there, that was missing,
It is the only things haunting
A man alone at night
A child turning
Words that calm and teach
Words that grow and sprout our heart, blossoming over wizened whiskers over a scarred face
Words like life and death that do define life and death
Pound and Eliot and Plato, but stronger still when instilled with a pulse

Instructing and limiting and stretching meaning like a flesh bearing flesh,
With the delicacies of love, sound as touch, yet at once thundering and relentless,
As clouds covering a hefty pillow over our lady Earth-
It cradles and croons, then turns away,
Cruel and stern,
But truly I think,
Music is the mixture of staggering loud, hushed whispers, humming tunes,
Do you think the child
Knows the power he carries in his whistle?

2.

It is a kind of fear
Seeing two ghosts of the future
At the dinner table with me
One with face long, dropping bits and pieces of meat on his tie
Food scattering on the table cloth like a gaseous form of stars in a mangled sky
What I fear is the unknowable future
The lines of my present point me to two sitting
My every action I fear is a precursor of what is to be
What I see is already cemented into the soul lines of two that are before me-
I am free I tell myself
Or is it a lulling tune that drifts me, like anesthetic before the putting on of sterile gloves, and masks and blinding lights overhead?

3.

Glance my way and
Perhaps
We can cross through this gnarly wood
Of pleasantries and etiquette we mouth wearily
For such "good" things all are brief and bittersweet
Poseidon's wall roaring between two deaf natures
We, two swimmers hold on to a slippery surface
Suffused with the colors of rainbow, a soapy hue
Colliding as bubbles toward the sun
Warm but distant
As we smile sad smiles
Within our own spheres of indifference