August 11, 2019
Dear Grandfather,
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Another you emerges. A grandfather wisdom—thunderbird shadow and three-bird omen.
Fighter in the Pacific Theater, tunnel between two languages, you embraced your Japanese cousins even as you were sent by the enemy. Code translator and second-born son, you stood beside the white general, saved by the ship’s weight from bullets and streaming torpedoes.
Grandfather, there are entire landscapes in me, alive in dreams and activated when I cross living seas and ghost-seas of the ancient, bouldered ruins of an earlier earth.
Meaning: Your face in the photograph is an illuminated pool I fall into. Strong in winter light.
Your shadow is an anxious animal, caught and distorted by the oak’s yawn.
Your braced, intelligent eyes are my father’s eyes; my uncle’s; your brother’s; my cousins’—the men in my family, broken the way you were broken. Brave in the bones, too.
What atonement is this all about?
I see my young self small and scared, teased in the white valley of my youth, in need of an impossible hero. Ashamed of what I perceived as your brittleness, and your distorted smile in the final years—clenched from within by heart attack and strokes—I hated anyone who could touch the hate I felt for my own face.
—and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living
I imagine dad in the Sierras, trekking alone through sugar pine and fuchsia to scatter your ashes.
Sometimes when awake in the ghost hour of the crystalline, pre-dawn, mountain dark, I hear bands of screaming, singing coyote creatures, traveling into morning, dousing the night with their electronic whooping.
Is all this close to the wolverine’s howled signals / that modulated cantata of the wild?
Later, I learn: the Nisei of the MIS were some of the first Americans to witness the death-scapes of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Through photographs of you in post-war Japan—posing with your family there and fellow soldiers, smoking on bridges, riding bikes through wide, tree-lined streets—I try (impossibly) to get close.
Is allegiance the knife-instrument of war?
…or, when away from you I try to create you in words, am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
Grandfather, there’s a man who wants to build us a house of light in the lush deserts at the southern edge of North America—the landscapes of your confinement. I’m surprised by my desire to live in the ruins of memory, in the heartbeat of a moment irredeemably playing itself out in a time before our family’s arrival, and after, and into the future sky. Is this what pilgrimage demands?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars…
In the anti-desert—the islands of southern Japan—Benten, the goddess of water, wrenches from the sea-bottom a fist-full of mythic, living islands. Followers make their yearly pilgrimages to her temple skirts. They pray for the protection of warriors; they pray for rain.
…to escape writing the worst thing of all— the failure to want our own freedom
My future freedom-dream is sculpted from the rock-ruins of the past. Each photographic fragment throws a shadow energy that recasts our lives in the blood of new story and remakes me. Regenerates, recovers, renews.
The night births my body’s desires and the sorrow-born flight into who I am becoming.
I have a right to be here.
There are entire landscapes in me—dormant, triggered, undead, waiting.
There were entire landscapes in you.
Grandfather, grow tall with me—
Love,
—Brynn