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The day you left me a monsoon rolled in the West,

dragging old tin cans down dead-end alleys,

the chirping of birds who so long ago fluttered.

Waves of khaki, their flotsam and jetsam a curious off-white,

washed over the concrete Taedong banks

as Grandmother pulled me by the wrist.

Her apartment smelled of ginseng wine.

The three rooms were appendages of their small inhabitant,

fluorescent pink water-lilies drenched in textured brown.

I sat on her kitchen floor (for the table could seat only one)

and did not speak, the tick-tick of the clock

seeming to enunciate the silence.

I could not look at her when she gave me my dinner.

Five years old, and we had never met.

The four blocks between us might have been a country.

I could not eat for three days in that house.

For each meal I turned away she hit me with her long metal spoon.

The welts were shaped like peninsulae.

I didn’t care. The pain was a distraction.

She watched her one TV channel all day

and everywhere in the rooms I saw you.

The potted bamboo trunk was the jungle tree limb which would hit you.

The stagnant water in the backed-up sink was the murky

river in which flowed your wine.

Every alarm in the night was your call to me

from a filthy hotel room, every car horn

was you screaming through a dream in a dank slumber.

The vivid memories from my a short life

flowed back in torrents without provocation.

I cried into a mite-infested pillow so Grandmother would not hear.

Every night I dreamed of lying next to you on the single mattress we shared.

Father was there, wearing the uniform you buried him in.

You kissed me on the cheek.

I stand on what was to be your doorstep.

Your body was likely washed to sea.

I love you.

Seoul, South Korea