CHAPTER 13
Childhood wounded him and made him
a poet. He changed the world. And today,
one hundred years after his death, he is
not so much a poet as he is the world he
invented, the climate he invented.
WALLACE FOWLIE,Rimbaud’s Illuminations, A Study in Angelism
When the poet stands at nadir the world
must indeed be upside down.
HENRY MILLER,Time of the Assassins
1. Yak
The Asia in Yak’s face had been imported from the Philippines but
his long limbs were grown domestically. His American father
abandoned his Filipina mother long before he was born but left her
with a savings so substantial that she never had to work again. He
was still a baby when they moved into a beautiful home in Los
Angeles overlooking the ocean and sequestered from smog. For the
daughter of a prostitute growing up near a US military base, it was an
unimaginable paradise.
Coming to America from her island nation a decade before to toil
as a maid for an élite family in the same neighborhood, Anna Po
spent these later luxurious years mostly praying to God and watching
soap operas. Having known only the sleazy poverty of Luzon’s
Angeles City, she considered herself blessed to enjoy the good life in
this city on the other side of the sea with the same name but a
different face. She thanked God her only child was born here and not
in that seedy hellhole.
“This is an unusual baby,” the priest told her at Yak’s baptism.
“Almost always they cry when you put them in the water. This one
cried when we took him out.”
Yak didn’t say a word until he was four and up to that point the
doctors considered him borderline autistic. When he finally spoke it
was not only in complete sentences, but with a voice beyond his
years.
They were sitting together on the beach together. “That is a
ABYSSINIA
198
 |
 |
 |
 |