‘Either you or I will have to go,’
my father said, eyeing the last potato.
The last of its kind, for the moment, it sat on a plate,
the last of its kind, broken up from a deceased estate
scattered through antique shops and distant relatives
and patterned with its own objective correlative:
Koong Se walks behind the garden wall
worried about her imminent betrothal
to some duke; meanwhile, her lover Chang
schemes to lure her into his Ford Mustang
or at least his dynasty’s version of it: a souped-up Sampan
with modified oars and a comfy bridal suite. His flight plan
is simple enough: to an island where he and Koong Se will co-habit
and he will become famous for his writings. They will breed like rabbits.
What does Koong Se have to say about all this? She dreams
about Chang almost every night, of floating away downstream
and even though, the story goes, they elope,
she’d never leave her father or push the envelope
of filial piety, even if she had ever existed
instead of being part of some ham-fisted
chinoiserie from the land of intrepid explorers
and the agents of the potato’s diasporas.
If it wasn’t for the outbreak of potato blight
Ireland wouldn’t have halved itself overnight
and my father’s great-great-grandfather
wouldn’t have come here with a brother
and two sisters who would scatter
Mudgee, Berry, Parramatta,
Bathurst and beyond. There wouldn’t have been me
aying with Mister Potato Head, somewhat pudgy
at three or four, plugging in a nose or an ear—
O where are the Mister Potato Heads of yesteryear?
Perhaps that’s why it is the most human of vegetables:
we gouge its eyes out, stick it in the oven, then on a table
as I did later, serving my father his beloved potato.
Of course, he was the first to go.