Listening, and: Winter

Abstract

Listening, and: Winter Esther Lin (bio) Listening Opera troupes came to the villageevery summer. An egg warm in his pocketmy father would run out early for a good seat. To watch warriors fight.For the handsprings, backflips. When maidens sang, he ate,he waved to his brother. Upright and bespectacled, his brotherplayed erhu with the pros. An honor. The lake was made of silk; the moon, too. Sometimes the swords spun so fastthat in his excitement the egg broke. His mother strapped him on the legsand hands, but the next day he did the same thing. When all this went away, his own fathernever apologized. Not for choosing the wrong side. Who could?Not for the famine. Not the flight. Who could—who could. [End Page 39] A piano gallops. My brother and father hunch over a tape deckin the porch room, sun falling on their backs. There. That’s the boy. He cries out. He’s singing, “My father, he has hurt me,” Tom explains. Who’s hurt him? our father asks. The elf-king. In China, the elves meddle too. Tom’s fingers dance triplets on his knee.Schubert is real. Goethe is real. Tom, eager to learn something fast and dangerous. Though no one’s called for me, I sit between them,schoolbag hot on my back. Dad admires the baritone’s vim.He’s heard the French and Italians, he’s heard Beethoven and Bach, but nothing so awful as this. The baritone plays the father, the boy, and the elf-king. He has to be really good to sing as all three. Dad rests his hand on Tom’s head, the shiny bowl-cutour mother’s made. We stop, we rewind. To hear itthis time without his schoolboy German, his faltering Chinese which our father corrects, gently. [End Page 40] Winter In order to see my firstpear tree I took three trains to a cloister shipped stone by stonefrom Spain to Washington Heights, then reconstructed to a more perfect wholeenclosing gardens laid by scholars of tapestryand stained-glass and the poetry of flowers,treatises on horticultural virtue, and inside one of thesea tree. ~ Not knowing coldmy brother was seizedwhen he stepped from the plane. Once an ice-popshared among three cold could be laid on the kitchen boardand cut carefully by our father—we watched carefully—into equal piecesto place into our mouths and suck. ~ With my husbandI wanted to be as children,sex a discoverywe could publish, win scientific prizes [End Page 41] for—I stroked his nipple to make it true,true as children making their waythrough a houseuntil someone bled,someone got angry and thenwe tiptoed. ~ Before he diedmy father saidwhat no one wished to hear. We should have stayed. ~ In place of marblewe weighed stone pine and magnolia, the difference being the stone pineis native to Italy, Lebanon, and Syria and the magnolia evolved before the appearanceof bees and my brother stood between two planters, speckledin their shade, saying over and over, I don’t know. They both feel like him, to me. [End Page 42] Esther Lin Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for twenty-one years. She is a 2020 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and author of The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America, 2017), winner of the Crab Orchard Review’s 2018 Richard Peterson Prize. A 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, she currently organizes for the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications