None of the streets here has a name,
but if I'm lost
tonight I'm happy to be lost.
Ten million lanterns light the Seoul avenues
for Buddha's Birthday,
ten million red blue green silver gold moons
burning far as the eye can see in every direction
& beyond,
"one for every spirit,"
voltage sizzling socket to socket
as thought does,
firing & firing the soul.
Lashed by wind, flying up like helium balloons
or hanging still
depending on weather,
they turn each road into an earthly River of Heaven
doubling & reversing
the river above,
though not made of much:
some colored paper, glue, a few wires,
a constellation of poor facts.
I can't help feeling giddy.
I'm drunk on neon, drunk on air,
drunk on seeing what was made
almost from nothing: if anything's here at all
it was built
out of ash, out of the skull-rubble of war,
the city rising brick by brick
like a shared dream,
every bridge & pylon & girder & spar a miracle,
when half a century ago
there was nothing
but shrapnel, broken mortar-casings, corpses,
the War Memorial in Itaewon counting
More than 3 Million Dead, or Missing—
still missed by the living, still loved beyond reason,
monument to the fact
that no one can hurt you, no one kill you
like your own people.
I'll never understand it.
I wonder about others I see on the sidewalks,
each soul fathomless—
strikers & scabs walking through Kwanghwamoon,
or "Gate of Transformation by Light,"
riot police rapping nightsticks against plexiglass-shields,
hawkers haggling over cell phones or silk shirts,
shaking dirt from chamae & bok choi,
chanting price after price,
fishermen cleaning tubs of cuttlefish & squid,
stripping copper carp,
lifting eels or green turtles dripping from tanks,
Hanyak peddlars calling out names of cures
for sickness or love—
crushed bees, snake bile, ground deer antler, chrysanthemum root,
bus drivers hurtling past in a blast of diesel-fumes,
lovers so tender with each other
I hold my breath,
dispatchers shouting the names of stations,
the grocer who calls me "daughter" because I look like her,
for she has long since left home,
vendors setting up pojangmachas
to cook charred silkworms, broiled sparrows,
frying sesame-leaves & mung-bean pancakes,
men with hair the color of scallion root
playing paduk, or GO,
old enough to have stolen overcoats & shoes from corpses,
whose spirits could not be broken,
whose every breath seems to say:
after things turned to their worst, we began again,
but may you never go through what we went through,
may you never see what we saw,
may you never remember & may you never forget.