Bitter Angels Pat Matsueda. El León Literary Arts. Berkeley. Manoa Books. Honolulu. 2021
A Prefatory Note by Alok Bhalla:
As I read Pat Matsueda’s Bitter Angels, her new collection of poems, I realised how profoundly they (more than her previous collection) are shaped and sounded by her life-experiences — a life of experiences whose tone and tenor and, perhaps, timber, is capture by the soft, almost resigned, and yet contented rhythm of the poem “Untitled Life”. Some of the poems are about lives of unbearable violence; about our willingness as human beings to inflict pain on others. But then there are poems that are sad, yet touched by the grace of acceptance and gentleness. They have the cadence which is familiar to me from the last lines of Keats’ “Ode to Autumn” — the quiet realisation of time, and thankfulness at having been able to spend at least a part of life in admiration of the beauty of the earth and gratitude for friendship.
**
Pat Matsueda
Poem for My Unborn Son
an apology
Years ago yes I could have had you
You could have been born and stretched
my world around you
A life doesn’t happen that way, though
Desire grows on a thought, a feeling
and extends itself, trying to grasp
what it wants
But if thoughts and feelings remain captive,
bound by debasement, poverty,
loss, coercion,
then desire doesn’t form properly
It doesn’t snare the light and dark,
properly braid the soft and strong,
tough and yielding
How little I understood,
myself ill formed
I had to protect you
in the non-space of being
the space of non-being
where your potential was unrealized,
unhurt by time
My perfect boy, I protected you from life
*
Untitled Life
Shadows busy
as shadows are,
breaking light into
disks spinning out of trees
and landing at my feet
Moving, going
somewhere my feet
step on shadows and disks of light
world in motion
but step on nothing
Time busy
as time is
breaking my life into
thought, reflection, regret
In the rush of experiences
we can’t tell
the placid scene from the one
near the end—
the one that hurries at us
quietly.
*
The Garden
In the dark vine climbing the flowers to the ten-pointed star
in the arch of the hands in solemn prayer
in the journey of the eye to the height of the black colonnade
in the tale of the boy who strums the harp
in the lotus shapes of the garden fountains
in the room secluded by thick Arabian curtains
in the olivine waves that crash against the rock
in the red and yellow roses broken from their stems
in the tawdry questions of the drunken man
in the tripartite name of a red-lipped girl
in the song that rouses a sleeping mind
in the nets we cast over His infinite forms
*
Valentine’s Day 2011
Falling into dreams is the solace of poets
Burned on an altar of ragged ideas
Resting in a grave of ashes
Your oft-repeated promises
My faith,
Casual to a fault
In the immediacy of a home
A cat pushes open the door
And lets in the afternoon light
Trailing the voice of a bird
Quiet falls from the wings of the sky
The green cathedral,
The death of Father Damien
The surrender of imperial Japan
As a bird turns in flight
My hand twists in the attempt to make these lines
On a calendar known as today
In a foreign place known as the mind
I write, wondering if I still
Know the language you speak
Purple, green, and black
Make a beautiful night
Down these streets a procession of cars
A stream of grief
Lines the face of a girl
Sultry heat, they say
Characterizes summer,
But might it also be the poet’s fever:
The poet wakes from a dream
It Was the Moon
It was the moon who teased me to rise
out of bed, from your side
Moonlight spilled its promise on the floor
I thought a stranger might have come through the door
but the coat of white had entered through the glass
and in our room had made itself at home
What of this encounter will you find tomorrow?
A broken camera,
disassembled into parts
and in the memory two hazy images:
a tall building and twinkling cones of light;
a shining gray cloud above a roof
No stolen kiss, no broken heart
just one witness: an ordinary poem
*
Wading through Your Happiness
for Calvin Stewart (1952–2020)
Passing my fingers through the afternoon
the notes fall from green
to silver to gold
We are passing through the afternoon
as if for the first time:
strangers into a glowing love
Walking as if for the first time
we are touching the borders of death
the breaths
of those who went before
We will join them soon
The angle of the day
Cooling on your brow
The edge of happiness,
the nearness of death
The low notes falling from grace
I am wading through your happiness
Happy for the time being
*
My Friend Looks at the Horizon
Sitting with Tom at Hau Tree Lanai,
we reach that point in a conversation
where understanding brings silence
we’ve been talking about the Aikaus:
Gerald, who hung himself
after stabbing his seven-year-old boy;
Eddie, who sought help for his shipmates
then was lost at sea
And I am reminded of Mahealani:
killed by her husband and then hung,
the two found side by side
Tom looks at the horizon,
beyond the mothers, children, and lovers
who claim the shore with affection
Noticing the blue perfection between ocean and sky,
he tells me of a future swim to Moloka‘i,
no fanfare, no escort;
his last wishes will already be known
to his wife
The swim extends thirty miles from where we sit
under the trees on this June morning,
and when he tells me of his plan
his eyes are as fair as the sea
Friends who meet twice yearly
to talk of many things,
then the last important one:
not leaving it up to fate but choosing
the way to die
The way we might pull our bodies out of the sea
My Brother’s Sleep
Sleep, dear brother, past the dying of the sun,
the rising of the moon
sleep till every error that holds you fast
is expelled in a sleep-filled breath
sleep as the constellations move above us
and we move toward death
sleep till there is no need for waking,
for to wake into a world of need
is not to be free
sleep, my darling:
innocence shines upon your face while you do
and I, in quiet wonder, will
watch the fiery stars for you.
******
Pat Matsueda is the author of Stray, a collection of poetry (El Leon Literary Arts and Mānoa Books, 2006), and Bedeviled, a novella (El Leon Literary Arts and Mānoa Books, 2017). She has been the managing editor of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing since 1992 and founded the series Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men and the ezine Vice-Versa. She thanks omas Farber and Frank Stewart for their support of her writing and their friendship. www.someperfectfuture.com
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