To My Father / To My Unborn Son

Abstract

To My Father / To My Unborn Son Ocean Vuong (bio) The stars are not hereditary. —Emily Dickinson There was a door & then a door surrounded by a forest. Look, my eyes are not your eyes. You move through me like rain heard from another country. Yes, you have a country. Someday, they will find it while searching for lost ships . . . Once, I fell in love during a slow-motion car crash. We looked so peaceful, the cigarette floating from his lips as our heads whip-lashed back into the dream & all was forgiven. Because what you heard, or will hear, is true: I wrote a better world onto the page & watched the fire take it back. Something was always burning. Do you understand? I closed my mouth but could still taste the ash because my eyes were open. From men, I learned to praise the thickness of walls. [End Page 155] From women, I learned to praise. If you are given my body, put it down. If you are given anything be sure to leave no tracks in the snow. Know that I never chose which way the seasons turned. That it was always October in my throat. & you: every leaf refusing to rust. Quick. Can you see the red dark shifting? This means I am touching you. This means you are not alone—even as you are not. If you get there before me, if you think of nothing & my face appears rippling like a torn flag—turn back. Turn back & find the book I left us, filled with all the colors of the sky forgotten by gravediggers. Use it. Use it to prove how the stars were always what we believed they were: the exit-wounds of every misfired word. [End Page 156] Ocean Vuong Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). A 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, he has received honors from Kundiman, Poets House, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, as well as a 2014 Pushcart Prize. His poems appear in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, Boston Review, Best New Poets 2014, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. He lives in Queens, New York. Copyright © 2015 Middlebury College Publications