CHRU-AN
CHUANG
1935-1991
My father died when I was a sophomore in high school, an age when you pay little attention to your parents. Only after he died did I realize how little I knew him as a man. He left me with memories, a few pictures, and fragments of his life.
Fragments
A photograph--you are standing on a slope
dressed to ski, your face taut
with youth and the cold, not knowing
that you are looking into the eyes
of your son, years apart.
For the first time we are the same age;
your thoughts must be similar to mine:
constant poise, status,
finding the right girl. I can almost believe
it is a picture of me, but it is too old,
and it must have been taken in Taiwan.
It crossed an ocean with you,
but while you aged
it lay at the bottom of a drawer,
surviving mold and the night
Mom tried to tear up every picture of you,
a modern fossil awaiting my hands.
And as I look, instead of your youth,
I see my own age.
I shoulder the years of your life--
immigration and children,
divorce, finding Christ
and moving to California.
And finally I am the one with cancer
growing rudely in my lungs,
wasting away, dying,
leaving behind my light
in a dim photograph.
--James Chuang