We begin rehearsals in a freezing warehouse

that was once a factory reverberating with the hum

and clanking of shuttle looms and the numbing

routine of days that chilled down into the soul,

that accumulated a tally of impoverished hours

spent tending a thread, a line of cotton, a line

of wool, all spooling and unspooling without end.

How privileged I am to be working at what I love,

to be collaborating with four men and five women

on a project that is destined for applause. I am

not one for speeches and group improvisations.

I will not impose some predetermined method

on the material. Instead, we sit around the table

and read the play. The lilt, grain and timbre

of their voices fills the room. There is no showing off,

no competition, simply the pleasure of imagining it

all unfold, as if a parachute is spread between us

ready to catch whatever shines and bounce it past our faces

while we watch it wobble, ricochet and spin. There is

not much to do but immerse myself in the listening.

And when Thao leaves her daughter, Mai, to go south

during the war, I suddenly see my father standing

next to my mother on the steps of the Saigon Opera House,

I see him buying a lottery ticket from a man with an open

suitcase and sitting down at a wedding feast with his friends—

all these young men smiling over bowls of rice. I must admit

that I’m hoping to find my father, or the ghost of my father,

that I long to be lifted up and swung through the air again,

to be wrapped up in his arms, to feel his cheek pressing

against mine, not the way he used to greet me, but now,

in this warehouse, in the pulse of this reading, to have

and hold more than the day when we last saw him,

when along with his ARVN comrades he shed

his uniform and abandoned his army boots,

leaving them unlaced and empty on a once frantic street.