Poem by Cynthia Dewi Oka
Art by Emily Young-Ah Lee
The winter issue of PRISM is on newsstands now. Order it here, and while you’re waiting at the mailbox, read this online exclusive poem by print contributor Cynthia Dewi Oka, featuring “White Curtain,” artwork by Emily Young-Ah Lee.
In Europe, My Mother Wears Shades
so I can’t see her eyes when I’m taking her picture
by the Prinsengracht Canal, in the breeze of
the evergreen windmill in Zaandam churning out
brightnesses for centuries-dead Rembrandt with a deck
overlooking farmlands so vast and flat I almost
mistake them for inevitability; under titanic
walls of three different cathedrals all named for a single
man, Bavo, the no-good soldier who got himself
sainted for redistributing wealth he married into, then
one for an emperor whose posthumous application
for sainthood was not approved by the Pope and had
instead a golden bust made, into which later, his skull
was deposited so that it could be carried ahead of each of his
successors, on the day of their succession, on a carpet I
imagine is red, as an emblem of his presence or rather, his
continuing, authorizing principle for those who
would kill or let die, save or let live, the citizens
or not, of empire. My mother decides she too, will
walk through the white heat of Europe inside
a kind of bust: shawl, hat, sunglasses like black moons
floating on her face, which makes me think of the surface
of water, tamed, no longer subject to tides, which is
everywhere here. You can’t miss the whooping men, women
in bikinis goldening their bodies amid a firework of water
on a plain Thursday afternoon—water that from the bridge
the boat engines seem to gash, the gashes strewn
bits of lace, before the skin shuts again, brown and in-
scrutable. My mother tck tcks my newly adopted
habit of standing in narrow lanes in front of windows with
their curtains drawn to mentally catalogue types of furniture,
books, how a woman slips on a blue dress and considers
her shoulder bones in the mirror, the dog napping, a father
slitting grilled fish for two small children, who stare back
frowning, perhaps a little afraid of the tan, black-haired woman
blocking the sun’s pilgrimage into their kitchen.
Once, we were forced off the barely existing sidewalk
by a plastic gate around a woman and her baby who were
sprawled on the street curb just outside a dim, narrow
house (lime green sofa, white walls, rattan barstools by a long
white countertop, low bookshelf doubling as a table). More
than once, there are men, young and muscled, quite beautiful
really, very Joel Kinnaman – maybe they’re all related, these guys, if
not by blood, then by money, if not money, then a secret boot
camp for beatific men or some other clandestine inheritance –
lounging in briefs among deliciously disheveled sheets,
one hand around the neck of a beer bottle, while the other
hovers over a screen, where I imagine they are tracking
stocks like soft rabbits or whatever it is rich, sculpted men
do on hot summer afternoons with the French doors thrown open
to an envious world, and I do mean beautiful, in the sense
that even statues of once living soldiers stationed to
stand on the ledge of a castle tower to watch the night, which
must have been so much more invincible then with nothing
but stars in it, have also been cast in gold, beside kings
on horseback and swans and angels and disciples of Christ in a
desperate front against tarnish – replaceable men who, if they
slept on the job, would have plummeted head-first
to the cobblestones below where dogs without masters
clicked their paws and tourists now toil with hidden, cloudy
hearts, that weird longing to disappear from the middle of our own
lives, where it is impossible to distinguish history from
the way a tomato reflects back fluorescence on its taut skin, is
caressed, then chopped… perhaps I just miss the tomato’s
alien being… I am not immune. In Charlemagne’s cathedral
in Aachen, I run my fingers over blue-veined marbles,
marveling at their cool confidence (in an earlier draft, I wrote
stoicism, but “stoic” implies a certain performativity in the face of
adversity that is absent from these surfaces which seem, rather,
fulfilled in their severe geometries) and of course we
learn of the repairs – revisions, really, given how much has been
added, how much taken away – tiles, chandeliers, stained
glasses, but especially scenes along the wall
circling the apse, where centuries have rubbed away
arms, legs, faces, torsos from the most recently painted
(Byzantine, because I was listening to the tour guide) version
of the holy community. It’s almost a joy. What they
call unrecoverable, I call almost gone. My mother
drops a euro into a metal pot and takes off her shades before
lighting a single candle to stand for her daughters, grandson, sons-
in-law and last living sister. Maybe that’s all God is.
The idea of taking something off, scrubbing away a layer,
until all you have is the dark egg of a woman’s
face, a plane of light unblemished by her life’s details.
Then on the train, the pastoral passing by of strong-kneed
cows with brown and white and spotted coats, the blue gaze
of empty swimming pools and freshly painted steel
beams in every station, a fort on a hill from whose burnt
battlements the moon rises. My mother tells me
things about our family, about love and grief being part of
a long-term strategy, choices made about whom, when,
and how to lose just enough but not too much, a math
I will not reveal to you, reader, though it might
clarify certain angers, might suggest or amplify the resonance
of particular images that could enrich your experience
of this poem as a flotation device… because here’s
the thing. I am my mother’s daughter. A woman who
crossed the Pacific Ocean without relatives or friends to
greet her or a language she could speak on the other side.
At dusk, the tourists lean back and swing their legs
along the banks of the canal. I am staring into windows,
casting my brief, slightly malevolent shadow on the family
sitting down to dinner. Sorry for what? My mother would never
let you see her watching at all.
Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). Her work has appeared widely in print and online, including in ESPNW, Hyperallergic, Guernica, Scoundrel Time, Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and various anthologies. With community partner Asian Arts Initiative, she created Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets in Philadelphia. She has received
scholarships from VONA and the Vermont Studio Center, the Fifth Wednesday Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry, the Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is originally from Bali, Indonesia.
Emily Young-Ah Lee is a Vancouver based artist who has received BFA in Visual Art-Painting from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Her paintings revel in the smallest encounters with everyday life – trees in a backyard, to patio greenery and to unknown parking lot. Emily’s paintings don’t only strive to expose the everyday— they revel in it, fuelled by dimensional shifts in perspective. Supposedly, a view from the inside out and back again.