"The Legend" by Garrett Hongo

The poem that ends the week with us is a narrative by Garrett Hongo, a Hawaiian poet with Japanese roots. Hongo apparently visited Chicago and watched a television special about violence in the city, from which he was inspired to write this poem.

Key terms: narrative poem, image, allusion

The Legend

In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
as a last flash of sunset
blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street.

He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese,
and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor
in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,
dingy and too large.
He negotiates the slick of ice
on the sidewalk by his car,
opens the Fairlane’s back door,
leans to place the laundry in,
and turns, for an instant,
toward the flurry of footsteps
and cries of pedestrians
as a boy—that’s all he was—
backs from the corner package store
shooting a pistol, firing it,
once, at the dumbfounded man
who falls forward,
grabbing at his chest.

A few sounds escape from his mouth,
a babbling no one understands
as people surround him
bewildered at his speech.
The noises he makes are nothing to them.
The boy has gone, lost
in the light array of foot traffic
dappling the snow with fresh prints.
Tonight, I read about Descartes’
grand courage to doubt everything
except his own miraculous existence
and I feel so distinct
from the wounded man lying on the concrete
I am ashamed.

Let the night sky cover him as he dies.
Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven

and take up his cold hands.

In this poem, Hongo describes a scene of random violence on a Chicago street. The first stanza gives the setting and background information; the poem almost begins as a landscape poem describing a poetic trip to the laundromat. The poem progresses, in the second stanza, to describe the moment of the shooting quite suddenly, leaving the reader as dumbfounded as "the man / who falls forward, / grabbing at his chest". The description exists in a careful choice of words in the poem - the "Rembrandt glow on his face" and "Descartes' / grand courage" function as allusions and concise imagery, instead of extended, wordy descriptions. This imagery is contrasted with the identity of both characters in the scene, who lack name and identity: "He is Asian, Thai, or Vietnamese". The third stanza and the conclusion of the poem describe the meditation of the narrator on his own existence, his culture, his connection to the narrative, and the kinds of transcendent connections that exist between our world and another: "Let the night sky cover him as he dies. / Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven / and take up his cold hands." The dedication at the end of the poem represents the author's aim to respect the (possible) memory of the man in the story, and leads the reader to the meaning of the narrative.