The Truth in Rented Rooms Poetry by Koon Woon Book Description . About the Author . Excerpt . Reviews . Events . Buy Books Now Aberdeen, 1966, or, driving around for a poem Driving behind a logging truck with dancing flags Pinned on the logs, I listen to "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles. Miss Freeland wants a poem for her creative writing class. In the pulse of sawmills, I cut this logging town Into board feet with my '55 Plymouth, with sawdust Plenty to make ice-cream cones. I tend to forget The manure that gives us Red Delicious, or this memory. Between windshield-wiper swings, I hear the tugs' blasts. Perch and red snapper flap on Scandinavian boats, Neighborhoods where I sold subscriptions of Reader's Digest In Finnish or Polish editions. Catching a glimpse Of a girl at the S. H. Kress coffee counter, I think Of the book on the backseat, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. The doctors in the antiseptic Backer Building can't take away This and other pains of a small town. It is near Xmas. My little brother peeks out the window Of the car. He is promised hot dogs and ice cream for coming along. If a pretty girl raises her umbrella, I'll write a long poem. No such luck. We cross over to Cosmopolis to see Boys fishing the Wishkah for sturgeon. The car is damp, the heater doesn't work. In the monotony of rain and windshield-wiper swings, I think I have a rhythm to beat the words against. My brother and I settle for hot dogs and milkshakes At a drive-in going out of town. You naughty woman smiling coyly at me with your smile curving like a sickle, and I, a handful of wheat, I am telling you my requirements are complex, but for now I'll order a #3 with your smile there, under the armpit of the waitress, across the room. The Eskimos offer to their brothers traveling the wide expanse of cold their wives. It is a cold day, I am sitting here and your coy smiles are unknown to your husband, with the newspaper between the two of you. My sweet-and-sour pork is tart today. The Chinese say vinegar is envy and jealousy. The kitchen is a gong ensemble; When the cooks go home in nights like bits of shrimp in bittermelon soup, Their wives will timidly rub their loins against them, but they will be asleep. I live here and the last time I went out for roast duck with plum sauce, I dined alone. Thank you for smiling, I am alive under the table. Sometimes when I leave behind the places I've been... Sometimes when I leave behind the places I've been, A series of cheap hotels, an empty bed smelling of cheap cologne, the darkest of my first uncle's real estates, a hot-plated hotel room, up many rickety stairs, with mice under the washbasin and prostitutes out in the hall, with photos of a family in Peru and a tongue unable to distinguish "l's" and "r's," finding citizenship a mile away from this den of poverty, where a thousand Chinese bachelors, tired of the Chinese newspaper, loiter in Plymouth Square or hide in clubs to bang mahjong tiles... When I leave behind, in roach-scattered tenements, these separate realities which bounce off my thoughts, like playing ping-pong alone with the table pushed against the wall, and now I am given a high-rise apartment in Seattle, overlooking the water so deep and blue, my thoughts aren't all that expectant, just a feeling of validation, as the tea stain verifies a cup of tea, and lightly now the traffic down below, and the muted growth, nevertheless, like the volume of the world, filters in, flies in...