An Authentic Life - Tapa blanda

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Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang is the author of two previous collections. Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. 

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from AN AUTHENTIC LIFE

For most of my life 

I did not know or understand 

the names of things 

I saw every day. Sugar maple, crape 

myrtle.  I mistook ignorance for wonder, 

wonder for grace.  

As a child 

I watched a friend as she rode 

English style, not knowing  

English was not the same as 

American. It was a lesson. From a 

bench

I watched my friend play master, 

envied her riding crop, her khaki jodhpurs. 

I loved horses 

only in theory,  

by watching. No horses  

hid in my toy chest, no lessons  

my parents would’ve strained  

to pay for.  

I had not been taught to ask 

questions. What is this. Who are 

you. Why.  I had not been taught to 

want. 

THE LONELY HUMANS

A type of hickory, it grows by water.  

So are we fools to drive to the river  

the day after our most savage storms 

have finally stopped  

to see a tree we’ve never seen before?  

To hike in cold mud through a leafless

forest,  to behold clearings now cluttered 

by whatever fell last night—mostly oaks,

no hickory—to attend the mad

performance of a newly roaring current.  

I do not want to call it singing,  

the wounded poet’s head howling  

downriver. Remember we scorned  

his broken heart, broken rashly  

by himself, some say, for wanting love 

too soon. You say I am unfair, that too much

rain is what makes the river rush (there is no

“we”  in what you say, dear): we hear it  

as mythology. We hear it outside  

ourselves, a surfeit of music

quickening  wind against winter

trees, branch-taps  

I mistake for premonitions. Of what? That the

tree is here, ready to spring to life again. I am

unfair. I want to love honestly; I want love

honest. Every tree is the wrong tree. 

This is the direction we get lost in.  

Beech, sweetgum, more oak. But she 

was impatient too, you say, it is possible  she

willed him to look back. We do not love alone is

what I think you mean. When I walk behind

you, the back of your head is golden,

ungovernable light I cannot look away from. Is

it love  that to follow you I find myself choosing

this unexpected path; should we find the tree,

will it be I who led us there or you? Long gone 

are the leaves alternate, compounded, each  an

arrow, the thrust of a green thought; somewhere

along the forest floor centuries crack and turn 

to dust. We have children, grudges, 

a Dionysian mortgage, habits 

mostly bad, and yet every December  

I imagine spring, our time past  

and to come, how when you follow me 

I track the blazes to reach the river, and

often 

I have to stop myself from looking back.  

To stay together, look away, some god 

said.  Here in these trees, our voices have 

no faces, we’ve walked like this for an 

eternity.