Homage to a Picture Bride

Abstract

Homage to a Picture Bride Garrett Hongo (bio) When years were long with labor in the sugarfields,I sought a wife, at last, choosing her from a photograph.She was but fifteen, a shy child of a bridewrapped in faded kimono, as I likewise was wrapped in wind,a man of thirty, weathered by work in the green seasof cane, my savings finally enough to take my wedding vows. Before then, it was to the coming world that I made vowsto wrest a new life from the earth and leave the fieldsso I might cast my eyes without sorrow from mountains to the sea,never again to falsify who I was in a photographas though I were a clerk or a saddler, sheltered from the constant winds,the image I'd sent, a deception to my young bride. She was young but daily growing, my new bride.We stood on the pier and took our vows,and I led her to the North Shore, its mountains torn by winds,below them the rippling green fieldsof cane stretching all the way to the sea,a landscape no one would care to photograph. [End Page 328] Before we left, someone took a photograph—this laborer and downcast picture bridehalf his age at their dockside ceremony of vows—staged before a background of slate-gray seasand the small curls of waves tossed by winds,impassive faces resigned to a hard life in the canefields. We were destined never to leave the fields—my wife gave birth to a son we did not photographas, before he could cry, he was taken by the windthat came betrothed as his own promised bride,journeying from the Afterworld over storm-tossed seas,our mortal dreams of a better life all but disavowed. She herself died within a year of our vowsand so finally escaped the sugarfields,a ghost in flight, ha-alele-hana, over the dread seasthat never would be captured in a photograph,so that, ever after, only resolve would be my brideand my mourning cloak a coat of harsh winds. Only the wind knows my sorrows now, whatever vowsmy bride and I made are forever lost in the sugarfields,this photograph the one moment we lived apart from life's cold seas. [End Page 329] Garrett Hongo Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai'i, and grew up in Los Angeles. His latest books are The Perfect Sound: a Memoir in Stereo and a forthcoming collection, The Ocean of Clouds: Poems. He is the recipient of the 2022 Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, and he teaches at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Copyright © 2023 The University of the South