. . . it is one thing to inherit the shadows of the past, another to walk among them.
—kid teo, “Boneyards of the Cold War”
A given life makes its peace with the ins
and outs of how things want to finish off.
You wrote—you write—you’d fail to do so much,
conflating what remains with what persists,
circumstance with the call to represent:
an unforgiving need to set things right.
But the piece-work of memory requires
both a gathering back and a letting go,
infringing on the slippage of shadows
enough, barely, that their fragrance adheres
to the cross-border shifts of common air,
to shared unbelonging. Cambodia
asks to script its disavowed aftermath
along the contours of your given name,
the music of what won’t transliterate—
like the fraught twang of a rebuilt Khmer harp.
You seem born to excavate shade-cloaked boneyards,
impacted rows of unaccounted-for
holed-up revenants. You fill gaps, keep track:
close textiles of unlikely semblances
like mulberry-fed golden-silk ikat.
Ardent, rigorous generosity
inflects your fierce kindness, a scholarship
of felt witness and keen experience,
sounding the plangent transience of loss,
scouring broken empire’s castoffs to gain
what fleet amount of earthly trust you can.
Your first book’s intro offers back-story
from early times of relocated life,
about how on warm nights your folks picked worms
(abject morsels good for quick sale as bait,
a needful humiliated cash-source)
from the freshly watered lawns of (a guess)
Maitland Cemetery out Highway 8,
while you were put to bed—too young to be
left home, former refugee poster-kid—
in the safe rear seat of the family car:
one more vigilant passenger learning
how love sets grief aside and gets to work.
Kevin McNeilly is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches contemporary poetry and poetics, as well as media aesthetics. He is a researcher with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (https://improvisationinstitute.ca). His book of poems is Embouchure (Nightwood, 2011), along with audio-chapbooks Ammons: A Sheaf of Words for Piano (2015) and Pining, for Broken Solo Voice (2020), which can be found on Bandcamp (https://kevinmcneilly.bandcamp.com).
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