Out of the Depths

Out of the Depths

Here I learn to sing for love:
St. James Church, Florence, Italy; 1982.
Out of the depths. Aus der Tiefe.
Bach knew that voices peel notes,
scatter petals before God.
In foreign lands the terrain is the body.
Journeys: steps among walls from an autumnal kiln,
red wine that stings,
cobblestones that beat boot leather,
the dust of clay and time.
This is an old world of art and gods.
Here, an alabaster youth towers
and crowds gather, transfixed
in awe of the Madonna’s electric blues, the child’s peach fists.
All worship the beautiful.
Halos, halos everywhere.
This air shouts love and belief. Passion—
the faint bite of a cigarette nipping dusk,
March cold whipping the back of my knees,
a quiver and kiss, a penance for longing.
The thrill and release is what I recollect;
the crisp smell of hope, the embrace of young flesh,
passion so wide the skin can barely hold it.
Memory is now.
What is love but an ancient bridge over an ageless water,
flocks of birds that hurry to the heavens,
a sky that echoes your eyes.
In youth one knows that the creation of memories
is its purpose: urgent, desperate, alive.
The release.
Such things follow me to China.


Here, continents and decades away,
I push back memory’s cloying scent and salty sweet
to stay alive.
All is half-done.
And what to do now, but to sift and store.
You from the past have remained
in a box I will always carry.
This is what it means to have innocence.
And what of love now?
A familiar traveler, a wanderer,
a man of rage and longing,
a rough rock of intelligence.
Poetry is difference and the unknown.
We unfold like origami; always the lines remain.
Then was the creation of the map I came to follow.
The compass rose blooms and points,
directs us to deserts and possibility.
Now I know the gravity of love,
how it breaks and mends,
its flowers and soil,
the cracking of its perfect wood,
the thirst of its jagged roots,
the light it demands and gives—or Death.
This ocean will surely come.
I have moved countries again. Again.
Time, time, from one cradle to another.
Love—bound in this place and a man without a country,
began in the hiss of summer’s heat,
through the eye of an Empire’s possession.
This East swallows. And I am one of its minions,
a small snack and nothing more.
I dreamt of everything then, as I do now.
This, this boat, ferries me over the water
anchors my belief, delivers me on hands and knees
to dreams that pour from my flesh,
to love that awakens again. Again.

© Stephanie Han