209 Part I

The Poem That Still Speaks: An Essay on the Poetics of Political Exile

Part I.

I got to Ulaanbaatar knowing it would be cold. Knowing the face of Myangaa, The Asia Foundation's driver, his tall boots, his hearty embrace. Knowing the drive into the metallic air of Ulaanbaatar. Knowing the puke and the used condoms on the street outside the new apartment block in which I stay in Josh's spare room. The knobby cot and set of drawers that's already breaking like the ones I got last fall at IKEA in Brooklyn and had to keep fixing with CVS superglue. (I used CVS superglue on my boots. I was that broke.) I wake up knowing the annoying song of the gas trucks, the mountain on the south side of the city past Jargalan Town with a white outline of Genghis Khan's face.

Where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world,
My elbows rest in sea-gaps
Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape
The body lurking there within thy body,
Carrying even her moonsails.

Thus begins a poem I cobbled together out of lines of text for Professor Weinstein's Civilization and Its Discontents Course at Brown three years ago. The semester I came home early and did my finals in the waiting room at the UCLA hospital. Weinstein, bless him, let students do creative finals and all I did those long hours during the heart surgery vigil was read over the assignments, from Sophocles to Blake to Adrienne Rich, and cobble together the lines that spoke to me. It was all I could do. The found poem ended up having 12 sections, and I called it "The Human Act". For three years the poem slept and now, here, in Mongolia, the lines surface and course inside of me. Perie Longo said it can take decades to write a poem. I also think it can take decades to read one, that as context shifts and whirlpools the lines brighten and come alive in new forms, resonant and cyclical and informative.

The sea is not a question of power.
Those clarities detached us, gave us form.

I walk down the stairs of the apartment building in Ulaanbaatar, passing the garbage chute on each landing. About my return this is unexpected: it's the off-the-record moments I remember from my year here, not the glowing achievements or abject failures. The time when I found myself farther west than I usually go on foot, and it was windy and icy and February and I had to go to an ATM but didn't know the lay of the concrete, black-slicked land. When I vomited mutton dumplings into a cafe toilet in hot September and Will made me rice. The time a loud screech and crash in the dead of an otherwise silent night had us both wide awake, though neither knew the other was awake so the bed remained quiet.

Hungry clouds swag on the deep,
The chief inlets of soul in this age.
The driver asked us where he was to go.
‘To the end of the world!’ I cried.

Tumen is waiting for me with Yoshimoto. I exit the building talking into my little camcorder about why what we (me and my camcorder) are about to go do is important. Mongolian youths stare and snicker at the blondie talking to no one. I live about 100 feet from where I did last year, and briefly consider tracking down my landlady and trying to wrestle the 200 bucks out of her that she conned me out of. That building is a rust-red magnet. A ghost used to whisper to me through thousands of miles of telephone wires in there. I head into the door above which a yellow sign says "London Pub", holding the camcorder in front of me all the while so we can both see his face when we come in the door.

When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses,
The placenta of the real, boundless as a nether sky
Into the deep, down falling, even to eternity down falling,

And he stands up, looking as young as ever though he's 50 now, delighted even though he is still in his own personal hell in Ulaanbaatar, without his friends and family, without his dialect, without his daughter, without his wife, and nothing has moved, nothing has changed since he got his UNHCR Refugee status a year ago except the man who worked there and knew him left, and he got a year older, and his arthritis is worse and his blood pressure too low,

The hoary element roaring--I have to learn alone
To turn my body without force in the deep element

His friend Natsagdorj translates for Tumen at dinner a few days later, after the've had shots of vodka and I've toasted with wine and we've all eaten the cow tongue salad, "He says he realizes now after all this, after three years in Ulaanbaatar without his family, to all of these international organizations, that to them, we are nothing to them--"

With that inward listening deliberation
The thirst-perishing man might feel
Who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned

Tumen is learning English. He goes three times a week. He has a bright pink workbook and is halfway through the exercises. I realize how difficult it must be to distinguish between British and American English; in the intersection at the navy-glassed, slant-topped Ulaanbaatar Bank, he tries to say "turn left" and I realize his British teacher says "turn" quite differently than I do. His Chinese enables him to embrace the hard "r" in the American version. The two workbooks have twenty lessons units in all, and, he explains in Mongolian, right now his teacher is the driver of his English and he doesn't know how to drive, but when he is done with the twenty units he will be the driver of his own English: here he mimes a steering wheel.

Lowering himself from rung to rung in onehanded swoops,
The bone hands roped with vein.
Seen in the smoke of cannon as in a vision
That the laying on of hands meant literally that.

We sit at a table. Looking at Tumen, who is in a jaunty beret, I think I have found the thing that separates people into two groups. It's an ability to have blinders. To not think about something, but most essentially, to stop feeling something. To shut it off, put it away, leave it behind. There are those of us who don't have a choice. We can neither forget nor feel less the pain and joy. It makes us good empathizers. It makes us able to brighten others with our joy. (Those others are sometimes those who like how it feels to be opened and seen but only for a short amount of time.) It makes us susceptible to suicide, both fast and the slow kind with alcohol or any other abyss: we don't have enough plexiglass. We feel too much. We think too much. We tend to die young if we don't find a way to deal with it.
"Light!" says Tumen across the table. "You lighter. I light. You light." He scribbles with an invisible pen.

‘Everything in life seems unreal.’
‘Except me: I am substantial enough--touch me.’
‘You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all: you are a mere dream.’
He held out his hand, laughing. ‘Is that a dream?’ said he, placing it close to my eyes.

That first night, in the pub with Yoshimoto, he and Tumen ask if I have a boyfriend. Of course, the first visit with a Mongolian, even a refugee who needs your help, will not be about business. I sigh. "No."
They refuse to leave it at that. I wasn't going to talk about this. I was here to do work, regardless of how hollow my waking moments were. But Altai's mother, whom I'd just met yesterday at Gandan, this refugee so dear to me, and his friend all want to talk about my heart. I want to tell them, I do what immature people do with pain! I make myself the tragic hero! I don't want to write another story like that! I'd rather be quiet! I tell them as simply as I can: I don't have the right kind of heart.
Tumen speaks rapidly and traces a heart on his stomach and we laugh. He meant the chest.
Yoshimoto translates, "You are an honest girl with a good and kind heart. It makes easy to break your heart. You are too honest and good and kind. You have to learn to be a little bit bad person from Mongolia."--he gestures wryly around.
"--Tenger tinkher!" adds Tumen.
"Because the heaven--"
"Blue sky. Tenger medne." Tumen points up.
"The sky knows."
A beat.
"The sky knows that before happiness comes difficulty."
The waitress in her white shirt and black corset sweeps, shuts off the front room lights. We sit, looking into our amber beers.

I have heard of day-dreams-is she in a day-dream now?
Her eyes are fixed on the floor, but I am sure
They do not see it—her sight seems turned in,
Gone down into her heart: she is looking
At what she can remember, I believe;
Not at what is really present.

It's two days after Yoshimoto goes back to Japan that Tumen and I arrive at the restaurant my old boss took me and Will to that warm September after picking us up from the apartment a half-block away. One has to go through a Santa Barbara-architecture style white arch to get into the courtyard for those apartments, north of Sukhbaatar Square and the airline ticketing office.
While we wait for the cow salad and Natsagdorj to arrive, Tumen brings out of his briefcase a sheet of paper and scissors. On the top half of the paper are sentences written in Chinese; the bottom, translated into English. He cuts the first strip of English and hands it to me:

"I do thank you for all the."

Zugeer, I tell him, Bi bag zereg khisen. I didn't do much. I could have done more. I wrote one article about him for InTheFray that ended in how Freedom to Write at PEN and I collaborated to get Tumen UNHCR Refugee status, and he got it! And it was a happy ending! And I got to bill myself as a Young White Girl Who Came To Developing Nations, Improving Things! Then, in NYC, I found out during a phone call the last week of my five months there that the one with the gentle whisper on the telephone was indeed a ghost: that the particular self presented to me, the one I loved, had been real, but had died and been dead for long time. I'd kept looking for my dead friend in the husk, though, and the husk had been hermit-crabbed by a complete and nasty stranger. Meanwhile I was doing nothing of the Improving sort, just reeling around in narcissism and narrative, applying to graduate schools I can't afford and selling books for cash. I was not Improving Anyone's Life, especially my own. I was not doing all I could for Tumen. Even worse than a tragic hero is a hero, of any sort.

And on the bleached bones
You listened to the sobbing wind.
Watch out for her; she can give you dreams.
Whatever place she run from ain’t going to be a whole lot
Different or worse than the place she is at:
Red dust in which the steady
Feet of the mules move dreamlike.

Tumen says he got the translations from the internet, but the writing is his, and the English is clear and legible. I commend him. He cuts off the next strip of paper:
"I plan to write a book to the refugees from the momoirs of wrier. Entitled "the search for freedom", subheading is: dedicated to Ming.
Should be able to be translated into English, Japanese, and Chinese."

I look at Tumen, his face unblemished by the darkness I know is in his heart, the shadow where his loneliness and hopelessness looms in his body like another body, where the smog gets so thick in the -40 wintertime that everyone coughs outside. Khereggui, I tell him. You don't need to. Thank you but you don't need to. I have not done enough.

We dream—it is good we are dreaming-
It would hurt us-were we awake.