如影隨形: ruying suixing
“Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”--Pessoa
As the shadow follows the body, we swing into each other’s life, inseparable
bank across the sky and over seas, past death wrangling like keys forgotten in the front door,
drunken our reach,
as the moon transforms itself from a broken tooth of light into a winged bird of white
searching the night for love and boney companionship, our flying consciousness,
our swollen selves grown restless, dried yet fragrant as lavender in a hand-carved bowl.
We were, once, there at the gate as the wings of the sea and the nest of the ocean beckoning.
We are, if nothing else, small bursts of memory,
between us and this spoonful of honey, tongues and language feeding us,
as the Taiwan poet may have sung as she fingered the sky with her toes in arabesques.
Time scatters like voices weaved about the autumn grass, small pebbles of hardened mineral rattling like a cup of teeth, bricking and braking inside the circumference of each of us. How can I begin to pass along to you all those small pockets of eves that now seem so often to make up the pitch of my waking thoughts and stumbles? How can I begin to give you all that has made me the person I am and because you are of me, in me, gone from me, have begun to be kneed and whittle-made you the person you too are becoming. Shall I begin with a memory?
We fall into earth long before we begin our step into flight, and we are transfigured.
This bruised island that I scampered over long before you were born
This bruised island that you bit into as fresh corn long before we had met
Along the hillsides where I once tented, now parked with cows,
The Oxen rid of their sun ranging in the shade of the trees, the hills, the dark and then a light brush,
a shadow before it has been forestalled, this swaying.
This making of you and almost-undoing of us.
Calves, children, boys and girls scatter calling, four brothers swaying in the sun.
We reached to grasp the shadow of our swaying, but our heart always reappeared
In the calligraphy of the land and the spoken mumbling of our tongues.
It begins with the knotted sound of a bell rung in a temple, the clap of something indistinguishable that takes flight, the flutter of a golden silk robe, the tap of a market cart’s wobbly-kneed wheel, the bark scattered in the distance, the inviolate movement of an old woman’s hands across the ravine of a green fruit, the bellow and the bought bough, gone-gong, left out in the tropical rain for too long.
Fall upon me.
Fall upon us as we drift, flags in the wind,
The bells of those cows singing along their necks as their herding along the mountains becomes our song.
The husky scent of the city below, the urine and the fried air, the language arabesques in the alley.
Of that we were made.
Of these things, we became.
And loss shall have no dominion.
