Editor’s note: The selection of featured poets for CT Poets’ Corner is now being done by Ginny Lowe Connors, former poet laureate of West Hartford from 2013 to 2015. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections; most recently, “Toward the Hanging Tree: Poems of Salem Village.” She is the editor of Connecticut River Review, was a founding member of the Connecticut Coalition of Poets Laureate, and was named poet of the year by the New England Association of Teachers of English. Her website is ginnyloweconnors.com.
June’s selection for CT Poets’ Corner is Aaron Caycedo-Kimura, a writer, painter and cartoonist born in Santa Rosa, Calif., who moved to the East Coast to earn a master of music at Juilliard. His poetry appears in many literary journals, including Poet Lore, Off the Coast, San Pedro River Review, Connecticut River Review and Tule Review. His paintings have appeared in galleries and other venues throughout Connecticut.
Read: More From Connecticut’s Poets
Caycedo-Kimura, who now lives in Bloomfield, believes that poetry gives him a way to “paint without having to wash and rinse out my brushes.”
“While I still enjoy creating visual art,” he says, “I’m fascinated by the power of words, how one can say something so many different ways, how truly sensitive one must be in his or her choices.”
Caycedo-Kimura’s wife, Luisa, is also a poet, and it is her influence that led Aaron to become interested in poetry.
“She began showing me her poem drafts and asking for feedback. I had no clue what to say. I thought that if I were to write and study on my own, I could be more helpful. She also took me to poetry readings. With all that inspiration, how could I not return home and try to write poems of my own? Now I’m hooked.”
Many of his recent poems are about his parents. He says that his poems about them keep them “alive in my life and give me a way to continue honoring them.”
The Miss Anita
A fishing boat sails
past the jetty
heads toward the bay
like an angel
skimming water
her train of wave
and foam fans out
whips the breakwater
tide pools into
salty confetti
showers a child
reaching
for a starfish
The Hardest Part of Some Nights
The fire engine siren raided
the air of my mother’s dreams.
She’d scream in her sleep,
my father told me,
even after we married in ’59.
More than a decade past
the Second World War—
for Dad, American concentration camps,
for Mom, the firebombing of Tokyo—
they moved into a San Francisco
apartment that rented to Japs,
a one-bedroom walk-up
atop a Post Street fire station.
They painted their bathroom black—
It was in style then—shelved
books, unboxed a new rice cooker,
watered a shrub of Japanese maple
for their future garden.
When the station got a call
in the middle of the night,
the rumble of the station door crumbled
into the rubble that was once her home.
Swirling lights flashed ancient trees into flames
through the thin silk curtains of her eyelids.
No warning, no drill, no cover.
My father stilled her body,
his broad hand on her shoulder or hip
as they lay in the dark listening
to the slowing of her breath.
The hardest part of those nights,
my father said, was waiting—
sometimes hours—
for the truck and men to come back.
Watching Grass Grow
My sister and I lie on our bellies—
tiny fists under tiny chins—
stare at a rectangle of dirt
outlined by pine stakes
and kite string. Dad has planted
grass seed off the side of the driveway,
says if we’re patient, watch
closely, we’ll see it grow.
My sister whispers,
I don’t see anything.
Expecting magic, I yell,
The ground’s moving!
but it’s only an ant
crawling over boulders of soil.
We get up, dust ourselves off,
go inside to watch cartoons.
After April rain and sun,
we have instant front lawn,
as well as a swing set, tricycles,
an above ground swimming pool,
bedrooms of our own.
As we grow up, we wonder
why Dad is so content
owning so little:
a tract home—the reflection
of the one next door—
an embarrassing glacier blue
Ford Falcon station wagon,
a small plot of land
he waters and grooms
year after year.
He never mentions his family
owned only what they could carry
to Jerome and Tule Lake.
Would that mean anything
to us? Or that the only grass
he saw at the Santa Anita “assembly center”
was in the middle of the racetrack
he spied from the horse stalls
where his family slept.
Dust
for T. Joe Kimura, 1924–2011
Formed of San Gabriel dust in a mold marked Made in Japan,
my father was born to work the earth, quiet rows of corn and fig trees.
War declared him a threat, ripped him from the farm,
drove his family into stalls, stuffed them into barracks.
Years later he told me, Trust no one—iron forged
on unyielding ground behind guard towers and barbed wire.
After release, he earned degrees, married my mother,
raised a family, planted peace in a suburban yard.
One nation under God weeded the land, interned a son
who buried resentment in a garden.
Ritual
My father drags a razor down his cheek,
traces a pattern—nineteen strokes—
scrapes cream and stubble
from drooping skin, like shoveling
snow off uneven pavement.
Cradled by an easy chair,
he conserves movement, pauses
while sculpting chin, labors
oxygen from bedroom air.
Early 1940s, he survived
teen years in Jerome and Tule Lake,
learned to shave, smoke, and cuss.
Years ago he told me, In camp
every other word was a swear word,
but I heard him say damn only once.
He also quit smoking—
finally in ’72 after inhaling
two packs a day for thirty years.
Face towel, shaving gel,
basin of hot water stand watch.
As ritual second, I hold a mirror,
refrain from saying good enough.
After ghosting a touch up,
he exchanges Trac II for towel,
refits the oxygen tube under his nose.
Oncologist at three,
car ride home,
final look at his garden
through the kitchen screen door.
Screaming Crows
to my father
One tree,
center of the garden,
the pin oak you silently
trimmed and cared for all the years
we lived there. Your tree,
bronchi infested with crows
multiplying so dense
no wind or light
could pass through. I shook
the tree without knowing,
heaved you onto the bed,
released the scream
of a thousand crows,
a cancer in midair.
The onslaught of wings
tore through my earth
as your eyes swallowed mine —
the dark expanse of a flock
in wild chaos.
Quiet dignity lost,
a Nisei gardener
slipped away in the echo
with the wind
and the light.
Shifting
She stares past the ceiling, melts
into cracks of memories that sink
fifty-two years deep. The absence
of his snoring keeps her awake;
the mattress no longer tremors
with every shift of his body. Today
she taps her soft-boiled egg—
a steady rhythm
like the kitchen clock,
slower and louder
without the blanket of his breathing.
He hardly spoke at meals—
consumed by his thoughts,
satisfied that his food
was always prepared the same.
She stares at his chair,
napkin, fork, knife,
and wonders
what it would be like to drive.
What’s Kept Alive
My mother crunches her walker
into the sea of pebbles
surrounding the stepping stones,
tells me, This bush
with flowers is Japanese.
That one is too, but different.
I hover close behind,
ready with outstretched arm
as if to give a blessing.
Pick that large weed
near the lantern—by its roots—
and throw it into the pail.
My father planned and planted
this garden fifty years ago—
hidden behind the fence
of their Santa Rosa tract home—
but Dad is gone.
She hires a hand to rake leaves,
prune branches once a month.
Soon she’ll be gone.
I’ll sell the house,
return to Connecticut.
A stranger will buy their home,
become caretaker of the garden,
but won’t know
that from their San Francisco apartment
my father transported the Japanese maple
cradled in a small clay pot —
the momiji now guarding
the north corner—
and that my mother chided him
for bothering with a dying shrub.
Detainment
Sprawled across the bed
my mother snores with her eyes open
yesterday in a mist
she wondered about her sister
will she be all right
my sister my sister’s children
will they be all right
I untangle her sheets
float them over her legs
gnarled vines of wisteria in winter
her soul stares at me
asks why she can’t leave
with no answer for comfort
she lets her lids close
waning moons above
the rumble of a passing cloud
Afternoon Infusion
My mother panics three hellos
as if startled by the noise
of an empty house.
She calls from St. Joseph’s,
says the nurses are slow
to start her hydration. I’m at a bar—
Stevie Nicks reverbs in my beer,
lures me back to the edge
of seventeen in this town
I left thirty years ago.
I take her call outside,
stand away from the smokers,
half-truth I’m at the mall.
She slurs a request:
milk of magnesia
and that other thing—
she can’t remember.
But I remember
when I was a boy,
she told me about the legendary
Japanese custom ubasute—
a grown son lifts
his aged mother on his back,
delivers her to a mountain,
leaves her to die.
I’ll come pick you up
after chemo, I say, hang up,
realize she’s already cradled
by the mountain.
The waft of cigarette smoke
and hint of manure in Santa Rosa air
usher me back into the restaurant.
The hostess smiles,
welcomes me—clueless
I have come and gone.
Morning Coffee
(after Edward Hopper’s
Office in a Small City, 1953)
Sleeves rolled up,
I’m at the office
before co-workers.
I just sit and stare
toward sunrise,
because I have no idea
what I do here.
Am I important?
I have a corner office,
high above Main Street
traffic, but the vent stacks,
windows, and water tower
across the street
gawk at me.
With these muscular
arms you painted
I should be outdoors
chopping wood,
hammering nails,
or sparring
in a boxing ring.
But without painted
window reflection,
my isolation is clear;
you cemented me
in a frame
inside a frame
without a door.
Hopper, if I could shake
my fist I would. You stroll
the sands of Truro, tour
the Cape in your used Buick,
sail the Martha McKeen
of Wellfleet Habor
but didn’t even bother
to paint me a cup
of stale black coffee.
Riff
for Luisa
I pluck you like a bass guitar —
your left forearm, my fretboard,
the ribs on your right side, my strings.
I boom, boom, boom a blues pattern;
the feedback of your laughter cuts
the soundcheck short.
I know only one riff,
but you ask me to play it again.
Connecticut Sunrise
The sun raises
a brush over a wash
of Payne’s gray,
swabs the oak
cad orange, drips
leaves on drop cloth
grass. From shadow
under the eave,
cuts and spreads
vermillion
across the barn’s
weathered crust,
dots a highlight
with fine point
in the eye of an owl.
“Dust,” original version published by Mouse Tales Press, April 2014; “Ritual,” original version published in Tule Review, April 2015; “Screaming Crows,” original version published in Off the Coast, Summer 2013; “Shifting,” original version published by Mouse Tales Press, April 2014; “Detainment,” original version published in Poet Lore, Spring/Summer 2018; “Riff,” published in Connecticut River Review, 2014; “Connecticut Sunrise,” original version published by Birch Gang Review, June 2016. All other poems © 2018 Aaron T. Caycedo-Kimura
