Poem of the Week | October 30, 2017

This week, we are proud to offer a new poem by Esther Lin. Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2018 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Adroit, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Crazyhorse, Drunken Boat, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She is a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was awarded the Crab Orchard Review’s 2018 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and was a recipient of the inaugural Undocupoets fellowship and a Poets House Emerging Poets fellowship.
 
 

The Ghost Wife

 

I am the second daughter
of a second son.
By Confucian standards,
not high ranking,
though better than being
the second daughter
of a sixth son.
I have cousins who
are such daughters,
cousins I’ve never met
and don’t expect to.
Not because of rank,
but a family of six sons
and innumerable daughters
born before and after
a civil war
is one scattered
over oceans
or behind borders—
where Confucius
has officially been
demoted. Not so different
from the Confucian days,
my father tells me.
If you left home
they held a funeral.
Any distance is
far away as dead.

 

~

 

My father says
he wasn’t bad when
he was young. Even now,
thin and buckled,
white hair nearly
floating away
as he laughs at a dog
food commercial,
his cheekbones are high,
eyes are bright.
Even now, in the
beige flannels
of a man who
no longer dresses
for the day, praising
the cortisone shots
that allow him
to rise from a couch
in a single try,
he knows
a good time.

 

~

 

When my mother
was young she was
everyone’s favorite.
Plump cheeked
with a body slender
as a shop mannequin.
She liked to lower
her lids when she greeted
you, secretively,
assuring you are in on the joke.
In the photo we blew up
and displayed
in a pewter frame
her hair is controlled
in waves ladies call
relaxed and so coyly
smiling she was almost
inappropriate
to be the host
of her own service.

 

~

 

Xénos, meaning stranger
a well-traveled word,
leaving behind
guest and ghost
in northern Europe
and host in the south.
Guest. Host. Ghost.
Our uneasy relationship
to visitors. Eat with us.
Stay with us. Not
too long. Still earlier,
the Sanskrit ghásati,
meaning to consume.
Not unconnected
to its later Teutonic
cognates meaning fury.
To wound, to tear, to pull
to pieces.

 

~

 

I don’t know Chinese
stories of daughters. My
father tells me stories
of wives instead. Of beasts
and spirits who marry men.
Like the Ghost Wife
who, after years of service
to her human husband,
years of rearing
their strapping boy,
is scorched by the sun.
She is gathering laundry.
The sun stutters away
from the clouds.
Indoors, rice bubbles
on the stove. Her face
and hands are bubbling
too. She does not cry
out. She does not speak.
She is hurried indoors.
What to do?
The neighbors, the talk.
The thing to do
is lay her in a coffin
upstairs
and close the lid.

 

~

 

Such wives were
revered by my grandmother
and her grandmother.
Who knows what single
women thought? Single—
that is, unmarriageable.
The sickly, the ugly,
otherwise kept back
to tend ageing parents.
A role my mother groomed
me for. To fold sheets.
Call credit card companies.
Make light chatter. Drive.
She died suddenly,
before she could enjoy
this. Three years later
I did the unthinkable:
I married. According
to these folk tales,
it is not the union
of inhuman to human
that is the great metaphor.
You are not nothing
before you marry.
Rather, you are simply
one without a story.
Become a wife.
That is a metamorphosis
worthy of legend.

 

~

 

鬼         guĭ

 

When I speak
Chinese I too
am a guest.
My father is
patient; he
inscribes a character
on my palm as he
names its glyphs.
A face, a tail,
and another tail.
He did this
when I was small
and reluctant
to learn. Today
I can read six
characters. My name.
Home. Nation.
Love. Door.
But I liked
the tickle of language
on my palm, that
my father did this
because his
grandfather did,
to save paper and ink
in the land he calls
the prairies
of rural south China.
A face, a tail, a tail.
It means a ghost, a fiend,
a derogatory term,
my father’s preferred
phrase for Americans.
But guĭ is always
foreign. To return.
To deceive. To overawe.
To be the one
who overawes.
I write this
without certainty,
to the one
who overawes me.

 

~

 

It’s my sister who
authorizes that Mother
be unplugged.
My father and I
don’t go with her.
She leaves, then returns
silent. The next day
she wants to watch
the latest zombie program.
A man can’t bring himself
to shoot his wife
as she wanders the streets.
Dead, she remains
lovely. Dress damp,
feet bare as if
returned from a party,
pumps slipped off
and left in the foyer.
The man readies himself
at the second-story window
with a chair and rifle.
She stands on the blacktop.
She is looking at the door.
Hello my love.
Will you open up?
At the credits my father
leans back, clears
his throat. He says,
I can tell one better.

 
 

Author’s Note:

 
Ghost wives are everywhere, I’m learning. Recently, listening to my mother-in-law Miriam, aunts Kathy and Patricia—of that old New York stock: Irish, Italian, German—talk, I realized they too had ghost wives for mothers. A woman who rarely communicated and vanished all too soon before they were old enough to ask the “right questions.” A ghost wife is a mystery. An act of forgetting.
 
It’s through my father that I gain any grasp of my ancestors, their culture. It’s true that the night my mother died, he told my sister and me the melancholy and all-too-revealing tale of the Ghost Wife, perhaps intending to explain something of his grief, his awareness.
 
But “The Ghost Wife” is a poem about daughters: how we comfort ourselves after a mother’s death, then regret how tenuous our hold over our own lineage continues to be.
 

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