After Eduardo C. Corral

July, 2007. Father takes me to the blooming saguaros 

of the California desert, our bodies baptized ghostly

under the watchful eye of dusk. Amid the red sand, 

black rock, Mexican poppies, silence looms--

a shadow between us. A wordless yearning that bears no English

equivalent. Perhaps Ba is thinking of the summer he sold peaches

by the Beijing roadside for the restless dream of flight, 

the uncharted promised land tucked beneath his tongue. 

Or perhaps of the thunderstorm the evening before he left, 

his mother rubbing his earlobes as shelter from thunder’s gorgeous waltz, 

pirouetting intimately over their shivering bodies, a final gesture of grace. 

Or maybe of the restaurant in Adelanto where he first held 

the pennies of America’s glory between his yellowed teeth, where his co-workers, 

unable to pronounce his name, christened him Tom. Now, 

dusk caresses its barely calloused light over the folds of father’s eyes. 

The blood sun crawls into the yawning jaw of the arroyo. 

Father cups my face, soft and pink as peaches, between his palm, 

calls me 喜悦, his greatest joy. Five years new, I came unexpected and electric, 

the slowest lightning. Unhaunted by the clean notes 

of thunderstorms or airplanes, no dark dreams stir me

in restless sleep. My father searched for mercy 

in the dawn of this beautiful country, discovered instead

Bud-light bottles, a broken AC unit, a scar

carved by a white man’s fist under porch-light. 

This desert town--a ghost buried in Ba’s bones. 

The muscle-memory of scraping, scraping,

scraping the day’s worth of dirt, chloride, stacked dishes

from under his fingernails. Bleeding, cracked, 

his homeland washed away like soil. What distances we cross. 

What darkness we bury.