Collage of Seoul

Poems

Newman

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498207256
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Collage of Seoul is a book of poetry tracing the spiritual journey of a man who, unnamed at birth, looks to both Eastern and Western cultures to form an identity through a love story that culminates with the decisive act of naming his two daughters. Through a mix of narrative and lyric poetry, Collage of Seoul transports the reader into a simulated flight between dreamscape and reality, faith and doubt, and allegory and biography as we are invited to explore the dangerous field of investigating who we are and where we come from.

I.

Loran

I never needed to find myself.

They did a good job at the orphanage.

Scooped up all my pieces, tied them

tightly with a cub scout knot.

It came as a surprise, one night,

to hear my heart create a second beat.

Listening on a stethoscope, I heard

its space: a limpid muscle, likely dead.

Even so, the loran, it ached. Like any explorer,

I know naming is part of the job.

Charting without genes, without you,

I find it hard to trust the maps and stars

of other men. If I follow anything,

may it be the sound I cannot hear,

the feeling causing me to stand, the needle

blistering back and forth

as we meet behind my river nerve:

a thousand candles floating in paper boats.

Apartment Near Airport

Soft words folded into envelopes of prayer.

The dogs hear it first.

Not my prayer, but the sound

of shadows in the neighboring trees.

I can feel the shadow of the engine

before I hear it.

Body at rest, I wrestle with God,

nurse wounds in the dark.

Bracing for the heavy presence of the plane,

I cringe in its sound, crawl out

holding wings while steel hips rust

to reveal a man who was never a child,

a man who wanders airports alone at night

attracted to the ebb and flow of runways,

where beneath the grindings of identity,

there’s comfort in the fading echo,

the tail of the plane vanishing

into layers of mysterious clouds.

Unnamed

To know you never named me is to know

why I must name my life away in words, in waiting.

I went to the library, one day, and traced a peninsula,

Korea, into my sketch book.

I wonder if, later, you ever picked a name for me

while doing household chores,

hanging clothes along the Han River shore, or maybe

walking home from the port

with a bag full of fish, and soap

to wash your hands of burying my name in dirt.

Mother Tree

I am free

cut loose from

the branches of the Mother Tree,

surrendered

to the fostered fingers of a silver bird.

I was nine

when I found you, planted,

arms part of an unreachable...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Part I.
• Loran
• Apartment Near Airport
• Unnamed
• Mother Tree
• Pushing Chi
• Aureole
• Postage
• Collage of Seoul
• Adrift
• Hikikomori
• Land of the Morning Calm
• One Hundred Words for Snow
• Part II.
• Permission
• Negative
• Doors Among Trees
• Reincarnation
• Two Thousand Lilacs
• Passports
• Word
• River
• First Slow Dance with My Daughter
• Artifacts
• Marriage
• Part III.
• City of Light
• Canticle
• Hives
• Sea Woman
• Album
• Breaking News
• Windsock
• Jade Pin
• Story Told Over Plum Tea
• Reflex
• Visions
• Part IV.
• Heading Westward at 495 MPH
• Wired Jaw
• Thy Kingdom Come
• Under a Hat at the Beach
• Blue Periods
• Song: Decade
• Paper Birch
• The Renter Mows His Lawn
• Parable
• Orange Slivers on the Nightstand
• Amen
• Touchdown
• Notes
• Acknowledgements