Telemachus
by Ocean Vuong
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase. Because the city
beyond the shore is no longer
where we left it. Because the bombed
cathedral is now a cathedral
of trees. I kneel beside him to show how far
I might sink. Do you know who I am,
Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer
is the bullet hole in his back, brimming
with seawater. He is so still I think
he could be anyone’s father, found
the way a green bottle might appear
at a boy’s feet containing a year
he has never touched. I touch
his ears. No use. I turn him
over. To face it. The cathedral
in his sea-black eyes. The face
not mine — but one I will wear
to kiss all my lovers good-night:
the way I seal my father’s lips
with my own & begin
the faithful work of drowning.
From Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Reproduced with kind permission of Cape Poetry
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Winner of Best First Collection 2017
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Ocean Vuong
About Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong (b. 1988, near Saigon) has been immersed since birth in the oral tradition of poetry, as transmitted through his grandmother’s ‘complex, wild and imaginative’ folk songs. The first member of his immediate family to be able to read or write, he moved with his mother to the US at the age of two. He lives in New York, and studied with Ben Lerner at Brooklyn College.
In its powerful contemplations of brutality, family and sexuality, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is almost religious and almost profane. This is poetry of questions, which refuses to separate the intensely personal from the globally political. It’s also an investigation into writing. Vuong says he is ‘interested in that shifting of meaning and usage because it feels innately Queer to me — how language, like people, can be perpetually in flux.’ Words, he says ‘are, in a sense, bodies moving from one space to another.’
In a good year, he says, he drafts between 6 and 8 poems, of which maybe 4 or 5 will be worth keeping. ‘I spend most of my time listening instead of writing. A shard of language may come: a phrase, a word, an anagram, and I’ll just keep it in my pocket, like a little seed.’
