TO THE FEW CHINESE AT DACHAU

Picture what they’d have done

With my wife, Tan Yi, her narrow

Hips, pouting lips, doll’s feet, and

Five-thousand-year-old overbite:

Tossing noodles, no doubt, wrapping

Jyouza and cleaving pigs

Back in the Nazi mess hall.

Between meals, they’d force her to

Rewrite Lao Tsu’s ten thousand things

Into ten thousand Jews, Poles, gypsies, 

Twenty-five other nationalities:

Limb-locked in purple, pink, and cream

Pastels orbiting the beautiful Moon

Of the Tao. Title it, they’d insist,

“Something Mysteriously Formed.”

After finishing her day’s revision

Of the Moon, Tan Yi would 

Walk back and forth on officers’

Backs, at the same time reciting

Revisions, the naked Nazis

Trying to imagine the death

Cries (up to now a camp mystery)

Of an Oriental. Just what is

The psychobiological pathology

Of this creature seized one day from

Her jewelry shop in Munchen

For selling jade to Jews?

Tan Yi, now in the camp museum

And unaware of her seizure,

Lingers before the famous photo

Of a man entwined in electrified

Barbed wire, frozen, sprinting,

Black hair raised and over

As though combed before the photo

Was taken. Tan Yi points out his

Dark brown skin. She suspects he was

African. All those volts, I say,

Can darken a European. Or

It could simply be the camera’s

Location in relation to

The day’s shadowing. She

Injects that he was likely

Chinese—always alleging this

About people who are brave and robust

Like this man, dead yet still storming.

Now she insists he was Chinese, blood

Of Hainan, the tropical island and

Farthest point south where skin is

Darker. He was Spanish or Jewish,

I say. “Okay,” she snaps, pointing

To the eyes, “but he must’ve

Had Chinese blood.” The eyes are not

Slanted, I say. They’re squinting.

She steps up, her nose nearly

Touching the photo, and admits

He could’ve come from anywhere

Depending on the season, 

Time of day, the camera’s angle,

The shadows, and our revisions

Of why he was running.