MAY I BUILD A TELESCOPE FOR MY GRANDMOTHER

poems by

ERIC JOONHO

for Jean

CONTENTS

1. I Am Very Smart* 2. May I Build a Telescope for My Grandmother* 3. Chapter 1* 4. Abilene^ 5. The House 6. My Banker 7. Eggs 8. Triptych 9. Dongsaeng1

Thank you to the editors of the following journals for first publishing some of the poems in this book: Yes, Poetry*, West 10th^, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place1. I am also grateful to Dorothea Lasky, Paul Lisicky, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, and Anne Carson for their invaluable advice in the classroom and out. Greatest of all are my debts to my workshop salon at NYU: Phil, Laura, Lucas, Lauren, Maeve, Maya, and Michelle.

1

I AM VERY SMART Tonight I spent forty minutes in front of the mirror combing my hair black and polluting it with product so it would shine. If my name were spelt Erik, then perhaps I would be more confident. In my tightest jeans and bluest shirt, I slogged to the train station downtown, sat at the bar, and ordered a beer. I took out my reading for the night, some clever Borussian text by a German teleologist. Someone was bound to notice how smart I was. I waited for hours as customer after customer passed me by until the bartender smiled at me, walked up to me, and told me I had to leave because they were closing in five minutes. Oh, I said and crawled out the door, right then bumping into a girl who dropped her purse: a pair of green bifocals and a Modern Library edition of Billy Budd wriggled out. I wanted to thank her for not reading Jane Austen, but I was fixated on the glasses, picking them up: Why don’t you wear these? Oh, she said, sparkling like water. They’re my reading glasses, but I suppose I’d bump into fewer men if I wore them! Clever girl. She smiled and I helped her gather herself and we parted ways—but I could still see her for a mile, her whiteblonde hair stealing down the street like a whale.

2

MAY I BUILD A TELESCOPE FOR MY GRANDMOTHER Professor Némethy erases the blackboard, white clouds coating behind yellow chalk gas, accent Hungarian glasses tilted down and suspicious. 750 E&M equations or 4 Maxwellian—simple is beautiful. It is an aesthetic choice to describe energy. Speed of light is not infinite; or, speed of light is finite. 3 times—I don’t tsink that number is right. Chalk clouds, plain girl raises her hand: Then with a negative velocity, can we look into the future? Tilts his head: No. But build better and better telescopes to see further into the past, hands chalked with yellow gas. In the beginning everything was high: temperature, energy, people. If you tsink about it. Questions we ask pertain to the before or the after, never the during. A localized burst of energy and careful language.

3

CHAPTER 1 after Steinbeck

To the umber country and part of the yellow country of Royton, the sun scarred the earth, and it did not burn the

peach trees. The boy Cody bit into a nectarine, found a worm desiccated, fed it to his red-capped oranda, whose water had sunk to half the bowl. Those days even the rich swam in partial lakes. In the last part of July the sky darkened over and the county was watered red in rivulets down the dirt roads, the top of the Ridge standing blue almost black with rain. The men rushed to the store for plastic buckets to catch the bounty, drink for the month and corn and Vidalias.

4

ABILENE High-strung, lanky from an aversion to red meat, Joe Abilene barely passed grade school. Dys lexic. Come junior high, hardly ever unbuttoned his burnt umber eyes from the ground, threw up from anxiety when confronted. But kicked through biology with ease, liked chickens a whole lot. Loved to fish. On a dry day, he and his father could hike out to the small forest in their backyard, catch a few browns in the lake, fry them up for dinner and call it a night. Saved Bertie the trouble. A meager kitchen they had built together with hickory cabinets and a cramped oven, barely a home. If the air was right, crisp, the ground incubated the carrots in their garden until they were the size of horse knobs. Harvested well, popped up like sweet daisies. On a dry day, Bertie could shred them and pop them into cakes, throw them into brown bags for Joe before the school bus arrived. If the air was wrong and wet, cream cheese spoiled, sediment washed away and unblanketed the carrots, left them to turn bitter.

5

Such was the case with Bertie’s second child: left the oven before it was done, four months too soon, for months to rot in the ground somewhere before melting into soil.

6

THE HOUSE I want to show you something Rachel said to Eli one night, driving off the highway onto a narrow country road. They managed to sneak into the unlocked red house through the backdoor, following the “Tennessee Waltz” to a kitchen with floral walls and a round breakfast table around which a group of men, in their work clothes still, had gathered to play old songs that never stop swelling. When one tune ends, another begins at the guitarist’s lead, the double bassist following with What key are we in? the fiddle running in and out of the blank spaces like melodic twine, the mandolin smiling at their guests, who now sway by the threshold 1-2-3, 2-2-3 and hum Now I know just how much I have lost, augural in tone. Eli, when he thinks back on this years later, will wonder how we end up anywhere at all, like this small enclave of closet musicians and sweet bluegrass, underground off a cold highway that for his whole life had led only from one place to the next without a second’s notice, and the waltz, though soft and distant, will ring yet clean on late rides past the unlit house, counting in triple time.

7

MY BANKER Today I met someone for brunch

My first date since November:

He was late and his hair was red

Ludicrously dyed, fiery

And my shirt was blue as usual

And my hair was black, and I drank

Black coffee four more cups after parting

With this nice boy, an actor.

The coffee burned my throat as it slid

Down, not from heat, but from spice

As if there were cayenne in there

As if a demon had slipped me a red pill.

I sat for hours and read my Steinbeck novel

You know, the big one

About the dispossessed family that loses everything

To a bank.

I dated a banker once

Cool and green, he loved me for a while

He said so, he said that.

When I finished my coffee, I got on the train

And it was especially bad this time

8

Because I think I saw the other man

My banker’s new man:

Perfect hair, cleft chin, tall.

What cruel little finger designed it this way

To happen on my successor in the flesh

To wish it were someone much worse filling

My big blue shoes.

Still, it was good to know my banker traded up

Good to know he was so cold to me

Good to know he was so good to me to leave me.

9

EGGS It is 7:22 a.m. in Riverton, Wyoming. How do you know? We just passed the sign, that’s how. Becky has not had her coffee so she is mean. Here’s a diner. Want to stop for breakfast? I don’t care which means yes so I pull in. Looks like 1988 threw up on the walls: pastel yellow paper grey fold-up tables powder-coated salt & pepper men with overbites and cowboy hats. We sit at a booth and fill out postcards to Georgia. I like my yolks hot gold and oozing. I don’t care who sees me lick my fingers. The mean-faced waitress fills our cups to their rims which is funny because now we can’t add cream.

10

TRIPTYCH

August 2, 1998

I dress and walk downstairs for breakfast: canned tortellini soup heated on the stovetop, skimmed of Italian fat by Umma. “Eric, like this,” Appa shows me how to eat it while it’s hot: same technique, skim from the top because soup cools in layers.

February 13, 2005

I have the Korean flu so my mother boils a Cornish hen stuffed with garlic, ginseng & prunes brings it up on a wooden tray with little legs. The salty, medicinal broth clear and umber pale will wash away the knots in my chest and add a year to my life.

October 26, 2011

On my way home from work I pick up a bulb of garlic at the store call my roommate, “Is there ginger in the fridge?” In the dark, bare walls of our flat

11

I attempt dinner: sam gae tang 30 minutes on the stovetop, skimmed of salt, grease & cold weather. Sam gae tang, I drop the words into the pot.

12

DONGSAENG1 I took my cousin to the Natural History Museum because she had read about it on the Internet and in that Salinger novel. Baegopa2, she said, so we had hotdogs and cokes before making it to the mammal hall, where an elephant was grazing the gravel, poised but stuffed (though I did not tell her that). In the culture hall, she pointed out that the Koreans who wore such ornate hanboks would never be caught in such meager studies. Those rooms are for the poor, she said and chuckled to herself, looking up at me with sleepy eyes: Baegopa, Oppa3. So I took her hand, bought her a stuffed elephant on the way out, and made her a pot of borscht when we got home. Before calling it a night, this eight-year-old read me an article on particle acceleration, something she had ripped out of a science journal. Mid-sentence, somewhere between cathode ray and black hole production, her stomach grumbled (I smiled), and she looked up through her thick horn-rimmed glasses to ask for a midnight snack, something warm. So we ordered in two bowls of jjajang noodles and fried pot stickers and slept well that night by the rumbling heater, the moldy bathtub, and the grey television set. 1Little Sister 2I’m hungry 3Big Brother

Copyright © 2013 by Eric Joonho Kim All rights reserved

Photo: Semi Song

Born and raised in Georgia, Eric Joonho is a doctoral candidate in English at Columbia University.

www.erickim.net