Elegy to a Beach in Half Moon Bay | DESCENT Issue #4

Paul Liu

I was here years ago, my feet in the muddy sand, feeling like the first practitioner of nomenclature, driftwood, clamshell, seaweed, shoreline. The names of the elements like dancing sprites against sea spray. In those days the colors had voices that darkness could not smother, and we could hear it there, in the gulls’ noisy squealing and lapping of the ebbing tide—the spectral secrets of a world unseen.

Today I walked out to the shore and found you lying there in the cold evening wind, wrapped in so many shades of gray, and hardly moving except for the heavy breath of those Pacific waves. I wanted to touch the water, that I might enter into the fluid, infinite realm and take a handful with me. But my hands were only wet and it was cold, the wind growing stronger, the night nearing.

All I could see was your decaying body, your drift wood and kelp flies eating through the sargassum, the upturned crab already cut in sections by crisp, salt waves. It reminded me of something long ago, my father standing over the casket, hiding whimpers in his hands. Standing here now, watching the ocean chase the darkening sky, I begin to understand what he meant by prayer.

I take a broken shell in the shape of courage and listen:

this body is a home,

remembered and throw it, watch it

splash.

Elegy to my mother’s hands

There is no solace here. Hands changing, exchanging until the palm opening at last, with the groan of a door, to an underbrush that she wades through.

Her birthday today, so my mother thinks about Taiwan. About so much left behind. About so much left to do. About leaving. When mother leafs through old pictures, she sees an infant that she does not recognize. This must be me, she says, unremembering. Where is this baby now? Its hands remind her of chicken feet from the Feng Jia night market and eating with her school friends under the old Buddhist archway. This baby, where? Unfound, unborn, kept as a wedding ring in the old jewelry box, but thank god she’s here.

She rises from green waters to a husband with his open hand extended like a blade— what can she do but take it, flinching? At least she is here now, they say (she repeats), her fingers cut by his. But still she believes.

She believes because it is the only time she sees eyes that can meet hers and swallow her voice, and because at least God does not tell her to Speak English, goddamnit like her three sons who are angry with their mother’s language and prayers. She thinks about her sons who have grown into men too heavy to be held and too modern for religion. She asks to be forgiven, though for what she does not know.

She dresses the cuts on her hands with cloth cut from her husband’s old shirt. Later, she will brew licorice roots from the local Chinese herb shop. Licorice root tea is good for breathing. It will be good to be able to breathe a little, she thinks.