Laura, a face in the misty light...

On a dark night in June
as uncle stumbled to turn on the TV
Aunt Daisy didn't have to ask
how it went today for
the one brother she called her
Chinese Clark Gable.

He'd hang around the dank studio lots
during a rainy day, hoping to play
a Jap officer, like his buddy Richard
Loo or even the good Chink Keye Luke
boy serving tea to American soldiers.

But the role I remember him
was my smiling mustached hero,
who'd flop down on aunt's sofa and hop me
on his knee as though he had one role
he could star in.

On nights he didn't show, my father
followed the trail of booze to a slimy
restaurant in Chinatown, where spittoons
still lined the floor under the tables
and waiters washed them down
with leftover tea.

Climbing the creaky wooden steps
to a den for guests to sleep it off,
father saw a smoky room of men
puffing long pipes and lying back
on silky pillows.

But my uncle in the next room,
sweating a soiled mattress
and hearing footsteps down the hall,
could see only the misty light...
"Laura, is that you?"

As a sailor home from the war,
uncle had young starlets urging him
into the 40s' limelight for Asian actors
until the lights dimmed...

But this girl he adored, a protégée
of Anna May Wong, kept his ring, he said,
like a horse in a marriage-go-round
he could never reach---except

on my aunt's sofa as he watched Laura
float from the magic of a haloed flick
into his arms-- "Laura, it's really you...”
in the noirish shadows between dream
and waking.

The night he saw my father
in the backlighting, of the doorframe
he opened his eyes enough
for father to lift them as if they were
globes filled with mist.

In the 50s while I, too, became
enamored by the movies, and father
told me this story, I could see uncle
rise and dash out the door like Rhett
Butler--- "Frankly, my dear, I couldn't
give a damn....”

But, as father told it, uncle went
quietly as a star delivering final lines
before the director whispered
wrap up---