Sublime

“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies” is a line, from the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay,

Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed.

it

I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.