TEMPLES OF TAICHUNG
Voices overhead
Temple 1: 福德堂
Fu De Temple
Red Lanterns swaying the night in guard for landlords who proffer their unease and damp lungs in search of might, for this is Taichung and her hungry alley'd ways pictured and scampering and aflight....
at peace in this city, even if the lanterns and the barking pull of the food market is but for a single night
a beautiful child, with a broken face: like a green spring breeze
The power comes not from the gaze or your stare but from the contradiction between the fever of eyes and the Grace and innocence of the elbow and the soft bow bend of the back, the moles and the wayward strand of the hair. Eyes may attempt to seduce but it is our contractions and contradictions that tell the greater more human vulnerability
The final line in your face, fingered by the red of the temple lanterns, as if in a breath
the profound bowing of your fingers and the night knee bends below you
I will steal for a poem from the cupboard of the night
And recite our body in questions and algebra
who are we,
our lives finger-laced, shaped in the orchid of the light,
bending toward one another, as a flower is bowed by the sun.
We are overgrown and under fed and we approach one another as fingers do,
As if a whisper
or rung bell bellowing.
Temple 2: 萬和宮
Wanhe Temple
To unstick the stuck knot of the days
As if that sneaker lacing
you once bent over to untangle
from the park bramble
and which lead to each of us tripping over one another
tongues and tap and tendon,
as the gravel'd path raced toward us
and our hearts raced away from us,
and the ground lapped up more than each of us could have expected,
the cinder bruse and buckled knee
and ribbed-caught carriage
and our together-in-a-moment unpackaged lives.
The unstuck knot of that day.
And all that from a $4 piece of nylon:
as it and we came undone.
Were it so.
Were it so.
And if our lives canter in their unraveling
then this reminder:
If as cheap in their cost,
the jute and the hemp and the tendon,
then be it as broad in its tumbling?
Temple 3: 金陵山天壇
Baiyang Temple of Heaven
The balsa cackles against the bare porcelain, boned,
as he elongates his unexercised hand and utensil,
hopped up on hoped fingering that becomes a small pivot:
to feed himself, alone.
The heart slips as easily away as the magura
from his grasp.
A lesson in dexterity and on being alone.
The sea is in love with you
A ghost incarnate of every broken heart.
Coda:
the light upon the land, the love lung’d up from the sea, and this lunar rocking.
Wing and braced, ghosts dancing in our throats and bones:
And so, uprooted
there you go.
your essence and your body pressed against the dreams and window of the temple,
our losses of smokey quivering of a dreamt la,
your movement, the desire tthat is hungered lost barking night
and above us:
moons, like hearts stitched in the puppetry of our life, hung there upon a wire in front of the red-shadowed street,
our meaning and memory pushed recklessly by night winds and market candles,
a glow
