I sit at the table drained, it's hard to feel energetic on days when you feel the weight of history on you skin, like a layer of clammy sweat. I sit at a table of strangers and if all things go well by the end of this lunch, we would some how become less than strangers. He is a junior and Chinese American. He is like me but quite unlike me. I am not an American yet, maybe an aspiring one, but he is one by birth.

The talk reaches my ears as I work through a plate of eggplant stew and rice. "Chinese is like, so cool, dude." He had been to China over the summer and he is telling his friend, who is also Chinese about that time. His great great grandfather left that continent to come to this continent. Another leaving and another arriving. Sometimes I think my life too has taken this form: of a bus station, where I watch the arrivals and departures not quite unlike the character, Forrest Gump, spinning stories in the gaps between each arrival and departure.

I almost ask him if he knew what his ancestor came to this country as. Most Chinese were brought to work here as indentured laborers mostly to lay railroad tracks. Maybe there are memories in his blood too that make him remember those days: that one when his ancestor saw the first snow fall or perhaps saw the Grand Canyon. I haven't seen the Grand Canyon except in my dreams. If I try hard enough I suppose I will see myself doing a tigh rope walk between the jaws of the canyon that is still being deepened by the Colorado. I think it's a good metaphor for the cutting of this slow sorrow that I am trying to groove on. But I hope that it will hit the bedrock someday, hard as granite even though these grooves by then would be quite deep and unalterable. Gulzar's song: "To live I had never thought that I would have to bear this much sorrow. Nor did I know that when I laughed I would have to pay back the debts of laughter in as many tears."

He is confused and is not sure what he wants to do after he finishes college. He wants to go to the seminary because he says, "I have some questions that need answered." He says his parents are disappointed that he didn't want to go to medical school. Maybe that's a question he wants answers for. I also have some questions that need answering and I have realized that silence alone is their answer. That and Time. Sun which was on my face this morning is now on my back marking passage of Time. Last night I was trying to remember very hard how certain people looked like in my head, people a few hundred miles from here and people a few thousand miles from here, I couldn't remember them as clearly as I was wanted to. Again the separation between Want and Actuality, the gulf that will never meet. The only way to travel between the two shores: the silence of the black water.

He says staying away from his family made him feel closer to them when he goes to visit them. I can't verify this fact for family by relation is too far away and family by creation refused to stay as a family. If emotions are a family too then my family is big, I don't even have to make to visit them as they walk underneath my windows all night, like stalkers or bums looking for a corner to put their newspaper lined cardboard boxes to sleep. Last night I was in a car that was driven around the city to see the Christmas lights. I could only see winos walking down the sidewalk, panhandling for a few dimes to be spent on crack. Crack that for a moment lifts them out of these endless cracks their life had fallen into, cracks that are as huge as the Grand Canyon. I am a trapeze artist, who is swinging by the safety line of these words and the love of an old soul. I arc between darkness and light, like the pendulum of a clock or the clapper of a huge bronze bell. Sometimes the ringing is as furious as a fire truck streaking down the street and at other times everything is still. The clapper is in the darkness of the cup, mute unable to sing. And the clock would have stopped when the pendulum stops to swing.

There is no more food left on the plate and I get up to go. There is an ebb in the conversation and I suddenly want to say something but not speaking often has frozen my tongue like a silver of ice. That perhaps is a bearable thing for I have not silvers of hope to give or faith to profess with this glassy appendage. Half truths always escaped me, yes is no and no is yes or things like that. So I took a napkin and scribbled the name of a book I was reading, a book of nightmares and dreams to populate my sleep with the latter, to see the former I don't even have to sleep. I give the napkin across the table and get up to leave. He squints at it and turns to ask me the name again. I slowly repeat the writing, the sound of my voice suddenly unfamiliar as if I am speaking in a dream. I don't know what he hears and what I say. I end up repeating the dedication on the second page, in what octaves in whose voices I was speaking I don't know. The clapper becomes still after I speak the words:

How may I touch you across this chasm of flown things?