Bradley P. Dean

Debra Kang Dean was born in Honolulu, Hawai'i. A third-generation American, she is of Korean and Okinawan ancestry. After graduating from high school, she spent one semester at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, then enlisted in the Air Force. She received both a BA and an MA from Eastern Washington University on the GI Bill, and in 1989 received an MFA from the University of Montana. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two cats.
     Debra's first book, News of Home, is published by BOA Editions Limited (1998).  Her poems have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 1999, The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, Intersecting Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women, and Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City.  She has new poems appearing or forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Luna and The North Dakota Quarterly; and has recently completed a new book-length manuscript called Precipitates.
 

Samples of the poet's work:

                  Taproot
 

Stooping to pull up a weed,
I think of my father
who made of weeding an art.

After work, he’d take a bucket
and his weeder from the toolshed
and clear an area of a yard he knew

would never look manicured,
whose quality would, at best,
be like something homemade.

He’d set the bucket upside down
and sit on it. Plotting a route
he’d shift the bucket, a move

so deft you might think he was just
leaning out to extend his reach.
He knew exactly where and what angle

to drive the weeder down,
north and south of the weed,
without severing its taproot.

When my father worked like this,
making small mounds he’d later
gather up in his bucket,

the dog would sniff at his bare feet
then lie down in the shade his body made.
Grounded there, he was most himself,

his hunger for perfection and control
giving way, finally, to the work itself.
It was easy to love him then.

        Inside My House
 

I remember wishing
that drumming on the table
would stop. I followed
the arm up the elbow,
the shoulder, in search
of a face, so I could tell
whoever it was to stop.

Having reached the shoulder,
I could see no farther.
I stared at the hand
as it drummed on the table.
I thought hard, “Stop!”
It relaxed, then started again.
That hand was my—her hand.

No one believes I’ve slipped out
of her body. I dreamt it, though,
and told the doctor who readied
the spinal. I feared it. In recovery,
I woke to find it was so—
they told her it’s all in my head.
I don’t know how

we could live without mirrors
now. The inside of my house
is all mirrors and windowpanes.
After I’ve watched her eat her breakfast,
I can turn from the mirrored walls
and, through the nearest window,
count cars and people as they pass.

When I tire of that, I turn
back to the mirror where
out of its glass, she stares back.
If I should turn from the mirror
for even the briefest second
as she begins to stand,
she’d slump to the floor.

In mirrors I watch her walk
up the stairs and through
the hallway—left foot, right.
I concentrate so hard on her feet
I can’t see what she’s looking at.
She plops down at the foot of the bed
and her slippers drop, left then right.

It’s all right now to free her,
now as she lies on the bed
and stares at the ceiling.
Does she wonder, I wonder,
what that steady knocking is?
If I could, I’d tell her it’s me
sounding the walls of her body

in search of a way back in.

    ADAM'S APPLE
 

     i.

    At twenty months my nephew,
    having already mastered the sound
    of sense, held my attention
    as I sliced an apple crosswise
    to show him the stars.

    After he'd strung three pieces
    on his finger then tossed them
    on the floor, he shrieked
    and kicked and pointed
    an insistent finger

    elsewhere.  Like the dunce
    who searched for fire
    with a lighted lantern, Tell me,
    I pleaded, tell me
    you little Neanderthal.
 

     ii.

    The skeleton found at Kebara
    made me rethink Neanderthal.

    Among the remains a hyoid—
    shaped like a wishbone almost

    the length of my thumb.  Bone?
    I press thumb and index finger

    against my throat in search
    of my own hyoid bone.

    The 60,000 years between us contract:
    He could speak.  And I—

    there was a time I couldn't speak.
    Some days, loving the lump in my throat

    I think of the impulse to name
    as Adam's curse, our apple.
 

     iii.

    Not the ash, but the bones
    are the reason we cremate;
    picking through what remains

    with chopsticks, we're after
    this one, in particular,
    Arimoto insists, pointing

    at his Adam's apple—
    we burn off the flesh,
    he says, and fire the bones

    just till they break
    under their own weight—
    nodobotoke, we call it

    Buddha in the throat.

HAIL
 

I was eleven the first time I saw it,
the November afternoon gone
heavy and gray.  I’d begun
to doze when something—
not palm fronds rustling
nor monkey pods rattling,
but more like spoons against glass
or small bells—something began
clinking against the second story’s
blue palings and rails, lightly at first,
bringing all of us, even the teacher,
to our feet and out the door.
                                             Not since,
three years before, when the staticky
Standard Oil broadcast had been
interrupted by news that brought to tears
even Miss Engard (who didn’t tax
our imaginations too hard playing
the part of witch at Halloween)
had there been so much commotion.
Seeing our teachers openly weeping
had frightened us even more than a word
like assassination.
                              Above us,
concrete.  Under our feet, concrete.
And all of us stretching our hands
beyond the blue rails to catch,
as they fell, clear pieces of sky
that burned a second,
melting in our hands.
 

                                      for Betty Adcock

“Taproot” and “Inside My House” appear in News of Home (BOA Editions Limited, 1998).
“Adam's Apple” and “Hail” appear in Precipitates and were published in Kestrel.

Read “Articulations” on the website can we have our ball back?

Read excerpts from “Meditations on a Rock Garden” on The East Village (Boston 1999 Volume)

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