—from "The Tree of Knowledge"
Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
1
Go back, you'll never see it again—
the loved face without shadows, the loved face rushing forward to the hospital
not knowing what will happen, knowing nothing.
I'm two, walking unsteadily, like a drunk dwarf.
Step by step you're learning what flesh is heir to,
you're learning what cleaves:
no angels watching over us, no flaming sword guarding the gates of paradise,
only the tree branching in every direction, dividing leaf from leaf
life from life—
know: no: you are you: not
I: this is Admitting: not the Waiting Room: not the ward
where our mother's hooked up to a machine for blood—
each name a nail,
something driving the world into words,
something engraving the body into a sentence that can be ungrieved.
I ripped her womb being born.
For weeks she bled so much she asked the doctor what it meant.
—Nothing. Bleeding is normal after delivery. It'll stop.
Why didn't he listen to her?
Unchecked, the lacerations never healed properly.
Unstitched the uterine tissue jagged and scarred, scarred and shrank.
Shrank too small to hold my brother,
trapped inside:
still feeding him, still breeding and breeding him with no room to grow,
driving his skull harder against womb-walls the larger he became,
making his torso swell and cramp his limbs until they stunted,
feet kicking fists pounding in terror,
mouth smothered eyes crushed
because there was nowhere to go,
because there's no other world to enter.
When they plucked him out with forceps, they say he cried beyond belief.
How long had he been suffering, before anyone knew?
Was the worst over?
So wept we, so much did it cost us to enter this life
wound in a mortal shroud of body, alone,
one...
3
Have you ever hurt your heart wanting, wanting for years,
asking why what happened
happened, hoping beyond the last desire to feel hope—
Father and mother ordering round after round
of bloodwork, tissue biopsies, chromosomal tests
(six years passing)—
And the child-I-was,
wandering the dusty halls of the clinic crammed with immigrants waiting
(migrant workers, refugees, war orphans like my father?)—
wondering why they laughed, or wept
strange tears that frightened her—forest of countless faces leaving—
What would you have done? What was the right thing to do?...
5
She never says she blames me, but I'm to blame.
How did I know what I know?
From husks of things unspoken, things unspeakable,
from kneeling between wood pews knuckles whitening,
from coins crammed into tithing box prayers stammered again and again,
from words tasting of gnawed nails, spit, ash—
Lord, how long wilt though hide thy face?
Why should we be patient, when death lies at the end like the fruit of life?
Why didst thou bring me forth from the womb?
Seek and ye shall
seek: I wanted to die, but death
is no remedy for having been born.
I don't want to go on,
counting, recounting the aftermath
like an eye forced open, hideously seeing and seeing and seeing—
sweet fruit of the brain shriveled in its rind of skull,
face twisted limbs wasted,
one ear withered to a worm, one eye soldered shut—
after what happened branched off from what might have happened,
each leaf and its shadow cleaving, each is and is-not mocking the other
like good and evil: but which is which?
Out of the womb of nothing, out of the infinite
grave of other lives, other worlds,
I see the shadow I could have been, the man and woman you might have become
and caught inside each, a stillborn soul, infans, with its tongue torn out.
I'll never know them.
I wanted to pursue them. I want them to break free.
O ghost-brother, ghost-sister. Silence like nothing
but not nothing. Dream-vowel. Implacable O.
Lie to me. Say you forgive me for being born.
—Suji Kwock Kim
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