Stereoscopic, thermal, true deep cumulus cloud top heights
Are you the Jung Hae Chae who / wrote Stereoscopic, thermal, true deep cumulus cloud top heights, academia.edu asks / it wants me to reply: This is Me or This is Not Me, that is the question / binary / picture this / snow falls to the ground unremarkably / thousands of flakes / cumulus / down down / stereoscopic / what of this unmarked terrain / some native plain / children / their lithe limbs thrashing in backyard, their dog chasing after, the quiet house behind them / matter / don’t matter / the anguish inside / all seized in this one perspective /
come to expect this singularity / what begins as two visions / cloudy / divergent paths dreamed inside the mind / -field of bodies, swaying, shimmying / to a memory of a hexagon among trees- / -cloud top / concede and coalesce into this one version / a blur that comes to an obligatory focus without our asking it to /
This /
unless something goes wrong / like the woman who only began to see in 3-D at age 48 / until then, a 2-D living in a 3-D world / she’d never known the tiny spaces / breaths / pauses / in between all those branches and leaves / between here and there / or / whatever else might be over there / nor / could she approximate the distance between falling bodies / nor comprehend cloud top heights / the fear of standing on the edge of rooftops / was it true deep or deep true /
this unified seeing above all seeing / given to us at birth / to help us wade through this terrifying world / to not to have to choose / between real and more real / goggles / to correct the inconsolable miasma / yet / what did she miss, really? / what more real than this singular body / stark-dark and thermal / this one nameless tree trunk trembling with truth / before the eyes open wide to the forest / peer into that crack / so voluminous yet unseen / by this trained eye / there / I want to reply: This is but One Version of Me / when bodies fall, leaves fall, snow falls, I want to fall.
In our dream band, on the piri:
Jung Hae Chae is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays, POJANGMACHA PEOPLE, winner of the 2022 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. The book explores the matrilineal han in the Korean diaspora. Her work can be found in Agni, Crazyhorse, Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 