Timothy Liu <LIUT@nebula.wilpaterson.edu> 

 
Photo: C. Arabadjis

Timothy Liu was born in 1965 and raised in the suburbs of San Jose, California. After serving a Mormon mission in Hong Kong, he received a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University and an M.A. in English from the University of Houston. His first book, Vox Angelica (Alice James Books), received the 1992 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and is now in its third printing. His subsequent books of poems, Burnt Offerings and Say Goodnight, were published by Copper Canyon Press and both finalists for a Lambda Literary Award. His work has been widely published, and his journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He is also the editor of Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, forthcoming from Talisman House in 2000. In 1997, he served as the Holloway Lecturer at U.C. Berkeley and is currently an Assistant Professor at William Paterson University. He has also taught workshops at Cornell College, Hampshire College, the Iowa Summer Writer's Festival, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and at the Asian American Writer's Workshop in New York City. Contributing frequent reviews to magazines such as Harvard Review, Lambda Book Report, New Art Examiner and Publisher's Weekly, Liu makes his home in Hoboken, NJ.

THE TREE 
THAT KNOWLEDGE IS

I do not want to die. Not for love.
Nor a vision of that tree I cannot
recollect, shining in the darkness
with cherubim and a flaming sword.
All my life that still small voice
of God coiled up inside my body.
The lopped-off branch that guilt is
is not death. Nor life. But the lust
that flowers at the end of it.

from Vox Angelica (Alice James Books, 1992)

THOREAU

My father and I have no place to go.
His wife will not let us in the house-
afraid of catching AIDS. She thinks
sleeping with men is more than a sin,
my father says, as we sit on the curb
in front of someone else's house.
Sixty-four years have made my father
impotent. Silver roots, faded black
dye mottling his hair make him look
almost comical, as if his shame
belonged to me. Last night we read
Thoreau in a steak house down the road
and wept: If a man does not keep pace
with his companions, let him travel
to the music that he hears, however
measured or far away. The orchards
are gone, his village near Shanghai
bombed by the Japanese, the groves
I have known in Almaden-apricot,
walnut, peach and plum-hacked down.

from Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)

SUNDAY

And when they sat down in the morning
to bowls of cold cereal, each in turn
would notice the blades of a ceiling fan
spinning at the bottom of their spoons,
small enough to swallow, yet no one
ever mentioned it, neither looking up
nor into each other's eyes for fear
of feeding the hunger that held them there.

from Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)

POEM

Late butterflies gliding through the air-

how else to begin without a mouth
full of pins? Life is more

than chrysalis. There are voices

in the earth, a vengeance you can taste
in all our crops. The monarchs

are dying out, some say whole streams

gone to rust that once meandered down
to Mexico. Our resident toad

returns no more. Only children

on the sidewalk writing stories in chalk
under blue pines dusted with wings

that flutter out of their lives.

first published in Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press, 1995)

SAY GOODNIGHT

No kisses. Not tonight. Stand
before that folding easel
and sketch the cup, the saucer,
the china plate.
  		We shall eat
after all our labors. No doubt
the canvas will be torn to shreds
as quickly as a pencil rolls
off the crooked kitchen table-

and night with its call of trumpets
will sound in our ears as lovers
say goodnight.

from Say Goodnight (Copper Canyon Press)