Counting Things

I wait for the elevator,

it rises from the ground floor

and beeps six times as it

ascends. At first the sound is

far below me, quiet, but creeps up

like a child who plays only

one note on the piano, and

out of harmless fixation plays louder.

The sound also possesses

the same frequency as that machine,

which I never learned the English word for,

that counts heartbeats,

usually of dying people.

In Japanese it is called shin-den-zu,

made of three kanji characters:

“heart,” “lightning,” and “graph.”

I used to confuse the word with shin-den,

made of two characters:

“God” and “dwelling place,”

it means “palace.” Long ago I stood

next to my grandmother’s shin-den-zu,

watched the green waves wriggle and thought

about the biology experiment

I saw in third grade, a worm

with Tabasco sauce sprinkled on it.

It was to illustrate the mechanism of pain

on the nervous system

in simpler life forms.

Since my teacher laughed at this,

the class laughed along.

The green wave is now my grandmother’s signature,

a cursive I would have taught her

if only she had lived long enough.

~

The Japanese word for number “four”

is shi, which is also the word for “death.”

The word for “nine”

is ku, which is also the word for “suffering.”

Therefore, Japanese hospitals

do not have fourth and ninth floors.

If the hospital is tall enough, it skips

thirteen also since suffering added to death

is too much for one building.

When I was little,

I learned two ways of counting.

One, normally,

the other, superstitiously:

Ichi, ni, san, go, roku, shichi . . . This way

my hands have twelve fingers.

~

Usually after ten o’clock

my grandmother removed

her false teeth and spoke less.

Anything I did—crunching up my face,

singing through my nostrils—

made her laugh,

hiding her mouth with her right hand,

begging me to stop. “You’re not

at all like your father.”

I turned away to the sink, where

inside a glass of bubbly water, rested

her teeth, diagonally, tired

of chewing. “But mother tells me

my eyebrows look just like his.”

To this, she laughed some more.

~

A hospital room means

counting things.

The number of visiting relatives I know,

the ones I don’t know,

how many times

they say the same thing,

umbrellas leaning against the wall

and each other,

cords that hold together grandmother

and her heartbeat.

That day I counted normally

up to a hundred and twenty something,

while my father and a doctor

paced the hallway.

Years later my father,

who is a doctor himself,

told me the content of their discussion,

“It took us too long

To get her to the hospital.”

The telling stiffened

his soft face.

~

The mornings of my childhood

I woke up to grandmother practicing piano.

She would start with the scales,

notes climbing higher until, even now,

they escape my eardrums.

Then, those repeated beginnings

of Chopin’s sonata,

which I never learned the English title for.

Sometimes I heard

the sinking of pedals,

the quick releases that followed.

And always I heard

the sharp reckoning of the metronome.