Illuminated Jars
“有時，紀念是最卑微的抵抗形式之一”--吾爾開希·(多萊特)
"Sometimes remembrance is one of the most humble forms of resistance."– Wu’er Kaixi
I
Of all the flowers and fields, of all the roads and ravines, of all the thickets of forest and fawn, is it that place, sightly above the slow creek behind the bend in the acre not yet parched or your long-ago backyard, left like a scar on Mai Huyền Chi’s shin, that place that sat like a chime above the muck and ducklings, the place formed out of the one day when we leapt and broke away the tickle of the water and family and county and cares, when she chased us and our parents broke, when the government cared and that flowered twig, the long chalky bone, longum and femur, which reached out with its small patella of a thorn: aucht and ache. The thorn, the patella that kneed my ear and torn heart, a long last scratch of her.
Do you remember?
The leaping out of and into the wide raft of things, our conjuring of living, bewildered things and their casting.
Leap
And then, opened
Of faith.
Of faith and the going, forever gone.
II
the difference between our appearance and the size of our encapsulated lives
among the herd, as we avoided people like falling stars, I spot a small red umbrella like a beacon in a sea of forgetting. And I for a moment was softened by this port light.
he salt in your hair, the brine on your tongue and your hopes marine kissed.
Beneath the arm of a cradling, stretched birch
Wind plants being upon all our bodies
Prostrate to receive the combing leaves
The dip of a snapped knob of knotted toughness--
Child or birthing twig.
In the twilight we wither longer becoming
grannies feeding pigeons from the library and the park,
Bent over and our hearts swaying in the long shadows and heat.
Soon, men gather recognition from their solitary soliloquies
Their voices coaxing them to fever or nostalgia for bravery
While women gather the still white bark in their fingers,
Webbing milk and spun thread from tree spiders and hope
Knowing long before the creak that their lives are disappearing into song.
In the cul-de-sac twilight, a lone Birch grows suspect of the jade turtles beneath his scalped roots.
Have you noticed, beneath the sea of the sky transfigured
How snowy our hips carry the weight of the shore’s crown and the solitary tree
Melted to sugar and tossed along, as if leftovers,
The narrow spine of nostalgia’s house
Smoothed down by the throat of a roof gutter
And shorn along the soft chest of the porch
The architect of memory—
The child in the front room togging and tucking
Soft inside and trolley clatters beyond clutter of the narrow street that overlooks the sea.
Kiss-fed lips, as a pebble fell from the roof and our heart and life broke wide open,
Long the green eyes, the temperamental duration of elements:
The heart of the matter is the same and, slips quietly
Gone.
Still.
III
She dreams all this up, like an heirloom recipe
The hammering of plants builds from cypress or the figuring
Of claws etched along the history of a tin room
Wood instilled from the scratches of patients
Dream known, as the rhythm of a loom.
And upon reflection bent back as if a reflection,
From country of old to filed inside of new:”
Who will lift the child out rom amid
The constellation of his heart?
Dreams fast slip.
Still beneath Birch, the tree limbs and the breath of night,
Your mother’s warmth and the tears that usher you as in a funeral.
Then is this: late summer and the scent of cool, damp grass in the twilight,
This child, that you once were,
Gazes into the kingdom of an illuminated jar.
IV
You, unstill’d, are incandescent, the dusting up of the world,
The world of coat and cum and cantor caught in your beautiful mouth—
The language of meaning.
Once you chased luminous night bugs in the grass forest and glowed, incandescent.
Is this not your heart?
Is this not your wobbly bone-work and fever,
If only your parents knew.
the balance the of the world, determined by the bite of the stretching tee,
by the lap of the licking toad, nearly lost in your lap.
The lightning bug’s arched their small tails of fire against the glass
a constellation against the clarity of the bottle,
The arithmetic of things.
The light and the silent scratching recalling his name
Staining his lips with that biological yellow chalk and the buzz.
Do you remember this, with
The insects phosphoresce rubbed and marked against your skin,
Aglow.
Was this not the first time you understood you were alive and had a heart,
Broken.
