Leaving Taichung Station

 We Amend : the Stroke and Strap of Motioned Things

The small dry snap, not twig, not stone, not mineral

But bone: of your twinning heart.

Can you hear it in your passing?

You the earth and the sky and all that came from inside.

That essential and real place: the bloom

Scattered along and inside the spine and stone of sky,

The quick in the land and the green breath of the sea.

The curvature that fit along your spine

Like a knot bowed around a cleat: bowsprit and halyard.’

Tuck and Tag. 

Tanging.

Leap out into the wide raft of things, you conjurer

Of the living, bewildered and casting.

Wing it,

Flag it propinquitous and pallitative— and from which steers:

The leap.

And then, of faith,

From our beginning, we are torn.

The stroke and strap of motion,

Our landlubber hearts and our anchored spirits.

Yet, we amend

And from the distance, the climb of our imagination,

Comes a mending.

Brave yourself, scatter wide

That which you have stitched and from which

You became, 

Scalloped from all these ordinary things, the pedestrian whole

Of you, of us,

Singing.

4.4.21

for the families of the Taroko Express Train Tragedy in Taiwan