Ritual on Stockton Boulevard
A ritual begins with the silent confession that it must be done again.
It is to perform a residual duty.
The peoplehood is a sun.
They herd in the funeral square.
Mid-June. A parking lot sans the isolated thinking.
Metal folding chairs with Chinese characters,
spray-painted as-a-matter-of-factly
under the seats,
made only to be read with implied loudness and haste.
Faced down.
Face the plated concrete intensified by the longest daylight.
Their chants embellishment for a gap
like the dew obsessed with a droughted valley.
A voice and then an unchangeable instrument.
An elder blows a carved horn, arched like a scythe,
outs a slow, wobbly groan.
The old men sing with a strenuous, operatic grace,
each sound cut short and sharp with unfinished existing.
An instrument is now merely a punctuation, so it is a cue.
It is an order, a scale, a timely cymbal clash evoking another groan
and another Canton hum.
These elders are cloaked like lords in
golden poppy robes and capes
made of fake red silk and scratchy glitter lace
keystone to unapologetic costumery.
Attopped with a paper crown.
This is by the barricade of Kikoman soy sauce cans
and post-ambushed frozen squid boxes left in the hot sun to sweat
on the unfurbished sidewalks that lead them, if they want to keep going,
past the past-its-prime community centers and
apartment stacks with the verdigris water hose,
past the donation boxes with miscellaneous open-toe shoes
and, if they’re lucky, a once-adored New Balance,
past the barbed-wire terrain with no more gold to stake
that is more sand-like than soil,
past more temples, like this one, with the hubs and the clubs with the phrases
“Friendship Association” or “Benevolent Society,”
through this unwalkable part of the city challenged
by those who have only known walking,
to their clothesline-and-cactus neighborhood
that has the other kind of a mid-century homes.
It is evidence of time made daringly intimate
and obliquely personal.
By the afternoon, everyone pours the tea.
Set the cash on fire.
Watch the supernova swell in the trash and the wealth hinder
and take our fingerprints with it to become nothing no longer.
Gone, so it’s better.
Even right.
Gray exhaust lapses the sight of the temple walls,
the virgin-summer sky without signs of any celebration,
or the people who don’t celebrate.
The gutter reels like a scored limb.
Melts into a scabby grimace with buboes,
its paint shell taking on the form of a charred lymph node.
A ritual is a calling of people,
of clerks and waitresses and plumbers,
of low-level state workers and franchise picker-uppers
and newspaper readers and soap opera watchers,
of Macy’s tote bag and Ranch 99 plastic bag collectors
and insurance agency T-shirt receivers
and second-round money burners.
They dance with the ash like under long-awaited rain.
Wear the scrappings of diasporic ode.
A cigarette-lunged squeal
from the old grandpa whose voice never breaks
and who breathes the energy of paper gold.
They see the lord’s dress khakis and Sketchers peeking under his red cloak.
Glasses stamped onto his lopsided nose
like a scorched root.
The complexion inflamed with wrinkles.
The rag wrung, grateful.
From his voice a hymn, the passing of linguistic metallica
scraping the long-corroded face.
Breath loud, certain,
with no more room in this universe to act lost.
Unwaveringly indulged in the scheme of what is to be sung and then sung again.
Together they roam
with light, synchronous feet
to a rhythm that was rough
like those children dried out with a purpose
and the burning of our paper wishes.
Here they have, or what is to be called,
the making of a race of humans
who turn into people.
Another set of hands depleted so they grab onto more sand
and more onto children,
heads a grudging bow.
Weeping under the sunken canopies with Opium lungs
and they sleep to a drum
but they were known more
for the corners of the world misspent.