Ocean Vuong reads at a nearby arts center that is built in a farm field with a stage modeled on the Globe Theater. My friend and I cruise in, nearly late, and the parking lot is full. Hundreds of people have arrived. On this holiday weekend, I’ve swam and eaten ice cream, stepped inadvertently from friend to friend, like the twilight walk that ended in darkness on a trail, two small women talking, talking, fireworks booming in the blackness around us.

Vuong reads mesmerizingly, like a dream. He begins with remarking that humanity began in poetry and war, and how this will shake out after the Anthropocene is yet of course to be determined. By the reading’s end, I wipe tears from eyes. Immensely talented, utterly humble, Vuong offered homage to craft of storytelling—its essential role in all human life—and to the women who raised him. Four Vietnamese women in hardscrabble Massachusetts wrested free from their bad men and raised seven sons. None of these women were writers, but they were all oral storytellers who told their stories to salvage their dignity from the harms of the men. The repair was for their sons—and themselves.

And the poetry and war where Vuong began? By the hour’s end, his words stream through me, like that Buddhist retreat I attended last summer, my body still bitten by cancer to more bones than flesh. In those days, for fleeting moments I could envision my own near death, that this body I’ve used so hard will go down into soil and stone, that tendrils of roots and melting snow will erase me from this world of language and teeming desire, and yet I will have never gone anywhere at all.

Likewise, listening, I realize the poet carried all of us, not one more than another, along his mellifluous words, that the human history of this country, America, is inextricably bound in the polarity of war and poetry, a profound rushing flood of passing time and undefinable generations.

Later, my dear friend headed home to her dog and her life, I wandered along the back end of the village where a dumpster lies overturned. From the rubble, I extricated a glossy Dorothea Lange photo, the famous portrait of a mother and children. I rolled it up and tucked it beneath my arm. For you, I write for you, because you are me.

NOTHING

We are shoveling snow, this man and I, our backs coming closer
along the drive. It’s so quiet I can hear every flake on my coat. I
used to cry in a genre no one read. What a joke, they said, on fire.
There’s no money in it, son, they shouted, smoke leaking from
their mouths. But ghosts say funny things when they’re family.
This man and I, we take the weight of what will vanish anyway
and move it aside, making room. There is so much room in a
person there should be more of us in here. I wave to you, traveler,
inches away but never visible from where I am. Are you warm
where you are? Are you you where you are? Something will come
of this. In one of the rooms in the house the man and I share, a
loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more
of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call
it Progress. We’re in our thirties now and I rolled the dough just an
hour ago, pushing my glasses up my nose with my flour-dusted
palm as I read, reread, the hand-scrawled recipe given me by the
man’s grandmother, the one who, fleeing Stalin, bought a ticket
from Vilnius to Dresden without thinking it would stop, it so
happened, in Auschwitz (it was a town after all), where she and
her brother were asked to get off by soldiers who whispered, keep
moving, keep moving like sons leading their mothers through
wheat fields in the night. How she passed through huddled coats,
how some were herded down barb-wired lanes. The smoke from
our mouths rising as the man and I bend and lift, in silence, the
morning clear as one inside a snow globe. For how can we know,
with a house full of bread, that it’s hunger, not people, that
survives? The man pours a bag of salt over the pavement. But
from where I’m standing it looks like light is spilling out of him,
like the ray of dusty sun that found his grandmother’s hands as
she got back on the train, her brother at her side, smoke from the
engine blown across the faces outside blurring into pine forests,
warped pastures, empty houses with full rooms. The man
clutches his stomach as if shot, and the light floods out of him, I
mean you—because something must come of this. Poetry makes
nothing happen, someone who is dead now said after a friend’s
death. When the guard asked your grandmother if she was
Jewish, she shook her head, half-lying, then took from her bag a
roll, baked the night before, tucked it in the guard’s chest pocket.
She didn’t look back as the train carried her, newly seventeen,
toward where I now stand, on a Sunday in Florence,
Massachusetts, squinting at her faded words: sift flour, then beat
eggs until “happy-yellow.” The train will reach Dresden days before
the sky is filled with firebombers. More smoke. A bullet in her
brother under rubble, his name everywhere outside her like the
snow falling on your face forty years later, on December 2, 1984,
while your mother carries you, alive only three hours, the few
steps to the mini-van where your grandmother, nearly sixty now,
crowns your head with her brother’s name. Peter! she says, Peter!
Peter! as if the dead could be called back from rubble into new,
stunned bones. The snow has started up again, whitening the
path as though nothing happened. Oh, to live like a bullet, to
touch people with such purpose. To be born going one way,
toward everything alive. To walk into the world you never asked
for but then choose the room where your hunger ends—which
part of war do we owe such knowledge? It’s warm in this house
where we will die, you and I. Let the stanza be one room, then.
Let it be big enough for everyone, even the ghosts rising now
from this bread we tear open to see what we’ve made of each
other. I know, we’ve been growing further apart, unhappy but
half full. That clearing snow and baking bread will not save us. I
know, too, as I reach across the table to brush the leftover ice
from your beard, that it’s already water. It’s nothing you say,
laughing for the first time in weeks. It’s really nothing. And I believe
you. I shouldn’t, but I do.

~ Ocean Vuong