November 9, 2022

Chris Huntington

I HAVE SEEN YOU IN MY DREAMS

In my dreams
I don’t wear glasses
or if I do, they are invisible
 
though in real life
whatever that is
I wear glasses everywhere, 
even to bed 
 
I still can’t see the smallest letters in my books
 
Even with my glasses, 
I am somehow fifty-two years old 
and rotting
eyes as dim as the moon in water
teeth the color of tea
a hairless head that looks like a skull
 
I remember
I used to be able to see quite well
but now my dreams, my life,
are both like the television of my childhood, 
everyone a few feet away, no close-ups
 
I have to hold books away from me
it looks as if I’m afraid I’ll spill them on my shirt
but really I just can’t see print
 
and people too
I hold away from me
 
My middle age 
 
has almost no kissing 
even less than a game show
where occasionally people forget themselves with greed and happiness
When I was young, my dream
was to live a life of adventure: 
Paris, broken windows, champagne, the moon
tree branches in the wind
love letters hidden inside a woman’s blouse,
dogs chasing horses
a boat in the harbor, but 
who can see—
at this distance
if the hanging sail is a message?
 
My real life is like a sitcom
everyone holding coffee mugs
and trying to be funny,
lines delivered 
to my cup of tea
years go by
 
ha ha ha
(the obvious and grisly fact,
much repeated,
that the laughter we hear
on TV shows
belongs to a studio audience
recorded sixty years ago or more
It’s the sound of dead people laughing) 
 
They say we don’t invent the faces we see
in dreams,
just remember them
 
so all these people and dogs I talk to
I must have met
or walked past them
in an airport
on the street
somewhere
 
I’m just remembering remembering remembering
though when I dream that I am flying
or doing the breaststroke at the bottom of the sea
That is something new
 
I dream sometimes
about my coworkers
who, in my dreams,
are all secretly in love with me
 
many uncomfortable confessions
most recently in a dark closet, the buttons of our shirts touching
her voice a whisper swinging birdlike around me
which has never happened
 
Zhuangzi said he wasn’t sure
if he were an old man dreaming
a life made of flowers and bending sunlight
or if he was a butterfly
dreaming he was an old man
 
Who’s to say?
 
Real life
whatever that is
not something I could have ever imagined
just remembered
though
incompletely
like when I pick up a thread or button from the closet floor
and it looks familiar
but I don’t know where it has come from
even when I pass my hands from shirt to shirt
 
what is this life
that leaves so little
behind
 

from Rattle #77, Fall 2022

__________

Chris Huntington: “I recently read a harrowing essay by John Matthias in which he asked his wife, who was suffering from Parkinson’s, if she was awake. She answered, ‘I don’t know,’ which terrifies me every time I think of it. I’m trying to make something beautiful out of this idea instead.” (web)

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November 4, 2022

Chris Huntington

A DREAM

the moon
in water
 
jumped like a fish
 

from Rattle #77, Fall 2022

__________

Chris Huntington: “I recently read a harrowing essay by John Matthias in which he asked his wife, who was suffering from Parkinson’s, if she was awake. She answered, ‘I don’t know,’ which terrifies me every time I think of it. I’m trying to make something beautiful out of this idea instead.” (web)

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May 4, 2018

Chris Huntington

SONNET, WITH REDSKINS

to Sherman Alexie

1. Sherman Alexie, I read that the Washington Redskins are finally going to change their name. This doesn’t affect me much because I live in Singapore. 2. All of the Indians I know are from India. 3. Still, I often think about the way we talk about skin because I’m half-Chinese, my wife is from New Hampshire, and our son was born in Ethiopia. 4. He is seven. As we watch the World Cup, he keeps saying he wants to play for Africa. Each time, I say: “Africa’s not a country.” 5. When I was 22 I lived in Africa, in a country called Mauritania. Some Mauritanians still kept slaves. It was an open secret. It was hot there, and the air was full of sand. People wore long robes and many women only showed their eyes and fingertips in public. I once locked eyes with a woman across the market and somehow knew she was smiling at me. I knew it. I ached to see her skin. I ached. 6. Six months later, I found myself at the edge of the rain forest just south of the Equator. I lived in a tiny bungalow in Gabon and drank beer on the porch. It was hot there too. We danced the zouk at night. 7. I fell in love with a Bateke girl. Bateke was her tribe. I sent a picture home, and one of my uncles commented that she looked like Tracy Chapman “with that pickaninny hair.” 8. In Gabon, I had no books, but I did have an old issue of National Geographic. One article began with a photograph of a Japanese man in blue jeans standing beside his baby’s crib. The Tokyo skyline filled the window behind him. My girlfriend picked up the magazine and asked, “Is this you?” 9. Sherman Alexie, you once said it made you sad when you went to England and no one recognized you for an Indian anymore. You felt you were the only Spokane Indian for 5,000 miles. 10. And yet, how tiresome it is to constantly find ourselves sorted by color, like Easter eggs or paint chips. My grandparents emigrated from Guangzhou, but my mother was born in Dallas. My father was a red-headed Hoosier. What tribe am I? 11. I was hurt when my girlfriend only saw my skin, my straight hair, my eyes. We’d been together for months. 12. Her skin was a beautiful brown, but I wasn’t interested in its color; I was interested in how it would feel against my chest. I worked hard to see her naked, but it didn’t feel like work because we made each other laugh, and it was the first time I’d ever sung to a girl. I’d never touched a Caesarian scar before, but I had scars of my own. 13. Everything seemed so simple for a while, and then it wasn’t. After I said good-bye, I wept like a child on the crowded train. 14. So, anyway, why can’t it be the Washington Americans? Sherman Alexie, you’re a wise man; tell me the answer. There are only three people in my tribe, and we look nothing like one another.

from Rattle #59, Spring 2018
Tribute to Immigrant Poets

[download audio]

__________

Chris Huntington: “Two of my grandparents emigrated to Texas from Guangzhou. The other two were from Indiana. I grew up twenty miles from John Mellencamp’s house and hearing ‘Jack and Diane’ and ‘Pink Houses’ on the radio made me sad because they represented everything I thought I hated about my high school and hometown. Since then, I’ve come to love those songs. I live in Singapore now. I don’t think John Mellencamp is a particularly gifted thinker, but I wish he were our president. When I go back to my hometown these days, I feel like an immigrant even though I speak English better than my grandfather did.” (web)

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