The Never‑ending End of the War

                                                 The Never‑ending End of the War

 My neighbor with a face behind the face like mine

 is walking through generations of rice fields.

 The rice is gone,

 the soil dried to a mosaic of crooked grins,

 and under it, layers of sediment, 

 and at the heart of everything,

 the dragon father, Lac‑Long‑Quan, 

 who left his sons divided

 into factions of the sea and sky.

 

 Echoes of old voices still reach here,

 but they're pitched as high as dog‑whistles ‑

 they don't vie with the crackle of stalks

 under plastic slippers.

 

 Friend, I can't imagine where you might be going,

 with a tread so light your bones could well be hollow

 on a day too still

 to stir the long white threads of your goatee,

 but walk carefully;                                                    

 the mines were planted on both sides.                 

Memory of a Meeting at a Coffeeshop in Saigon

 

                                                Memory of a Meeting at a Coffeeshop in Saigon

            The tropical glare squats at the edge of the shade,

            studying arcs traced by our coffeecups

            in the rise and fall between crude wooden tables                  

            and our lips. Our rhythms are regular as heartbeats.

            Overhead, coconuts are swelling to self-sacrifice.

 

            We're taking a break from history.

            All the singers in the boom-box

            are maidens wailing for soldiers,

            soldiers wailing for maidens;

            there's no telling which war is in which song;

            the same enemy keeps changing uniforms.

 

            Jagged bits of your unknown father's face

            keep falling out of disoriented features.

            I try to fit them together,

            as I try to assemble the words I know

            in sentences and reshape them to my tongue.            

            When you talk the words dash out like small birds                

 and your hands swoop after them like birds of prey,

            a quickness acquired from years of street-life,

            selling peanuts and yourself and cadging petty coins.

 

            What will it be like in the country of my waking,

            the country of your dreams?

            When will you wake up there?

            Will you wonder, like Chuang-tzu,

            whether the dream was before or after the waking?

           

            You search my round eyes and long nose

            for pieces that will fit your face.

            Every mei (your name for us means "beautiful",

            and we are as beautiful and cruel as desire)

            is a father in your eyes. Listen,

            when I smile, it means I have no face to lose

            or share.

 

            After the sweet coffee, the shopkeeper

            brings a jar of bitter Chinese tea.

 

Chance and Necessity

 

Chance and Necessity

(For B.D.L.)

From the liquidity of accidents,

the undefinable rises to events

that surge and crest in a necessary end                                                     

in definition, where they begin again.

 

The waves reform and roll back to the sea

to lose themselves in that green mystery

in which the forms perform a constant dance

of movements of necessity and chance.

 

The surface stretches away from where I stand

and curves around to another end of land

where, by rule of chance, you might now be,

or by law of hidden necessity.

 

The figures that dance across the water’s face

before us rise up from an unseen place

beneath the separations, beyond our sight

and leap for just a moment in the light.

 

I think they are the same figures, both here

and there, and that they appear and disappear

to you and me and join us in an instant

that waves away the thoughts of near and distant.

 

Distinct mythologies dissolve in sea,

as do the spaces between you and me,

so that the chances dividing us are only

undulations of necessity.

A Piebald Rock Dove Seen from My Window in Winter

 

A Piebald Rock Dove Seen from My Window in Winter

Alone among a flock of doves, all black,

this one, mottled, hobbles through snow spotted

the same as he, a model for his back.

I mark how dark ground divides the plot

Into contrasts of dichromatic curves

of disillusioned earth and remnant sky

that mundane warming gradually returns

from heavy land beneath to weightless light.

This tenuous mix has set this dove apart,

he is not so easily classed as all the rest,

he is a puzzle of pieces, light and dark

Incongruously entwined across his breast.

But when his wings turn cruciform in flight

ascending feathers below flash purest white.

How do we measure "diversity?"

 

A New York Times report on socioeconomic diversity has been widely publicized in academic circles over the past few days. The report has a bizarre way of measuring diversity, though. According to the report, the more students receiving Pell Grants, a form of economic support for low-income students, enrolled in an institution, the more diverse it is.

A reasonable definition of “diversity,” as it applies to people, would be have a range of different sorts of individuals. Socioeconomic diversity would refer to the state of containing people from different socioeconomic levels, whether we measure those levels by family incomes, socioeconomic index scores or some other relevant indicators. The more a setting concentrates people at any level; high, medium, or low; by definition, the less “diverse” it is.

But take a look at the ranking in this table:

The Top U.S. Colleges With the Greatest Economic Diversity - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Berea College, with 94% of students receiving Pell Grants, is presented here as the “most diverse.” At the bottom, Oberlin and Tulane, with only 8% of students on the grants, are the “least diverse.” One could dispute the use of Pell Grants as an economic indicator, but, accepting it for the sake of argument, a school with 94% of students who are low income is somehow more diverse than schools with 92% of students with the whole range of incomes above the Pell Grant level. So far, looking at all the news on this data, I haven’t seen anyone questioning this absurdity.

I think part of the problem might be that the word “diversity” has lost any clear meaning as it has become a shibboleth.  Any institution that includes more people judged to be disadvantaged in some way is “diverse,” so that the greater the concentration of disadvantages, the greater the putatively laudable “diversity.” And since “diversity” is an unquestionable moral good in today’s academic culture, the success of every institution should be judged by how much disadvantage it can concentrate.

I’d suggest that even if every school should aim at serving the same populations (a dubious proposition), there might be reasons why a relatively high percentage of affluent students might be desirable. If the school does not have a big endowment or a steady source of philanthropy specifically for the needy, then someone has to pay the costs in order to bring in the 8%, or whatever the portion might be. And that someone has to have the wherewithal to pay the tuition.

No One Home

 

Every morning I wake to a ringing phone.

My own voice calls me from the other end.

I’m sorry, I respond, there’s no one home.

         You’ll have to call again,

 

The Naming of Names

They woke in a jungle of leaf overlapped by leaf.

Eyes unfocused, the saw all things and none

in a wakefulness not yet distinct from sleep.

 

Their uncombed hair twisted in rays of sun

wrapped about their heads in crazy wreaths

of light and dark completely interwoven.

 

Their feet touched earth, the same dirt covered their feet

that covered the earth; they were a man, a woman,

still intimate, like plants, with the soil beneath,

 

As quiet as the grass; the two were dumb,

wordless when they heard the rustling leaves.

The beasts, by wing and foot and fin, had come.

 

The cats twitched tails, the serpents hung from trees,

and frogs squatted among the loosening buds

of lotus flowers, all waiting, patiently.

 

The names began to drop off, one by one,

One word fell out to pair with every beast,

until a parallel world of words was done.

 

With words they knew to tell each life from each,

and since the eyes are pupils to the tongue,

they began to see as syllables would teach.

 

They saw each line take on new definition,

as if cut from its background in relief.

For named this was a form of liberation.

For namers, though, names were limitation.

 

They knew their world and from this they knew grief:

By names their lives were bounded and made brief.