Leaving Taichung Station

Where I End and You Begin

“We sing to

Wing a string We sing to

Wing again”—Hoa Nguyen

Once we were born, bone apart long ago,

Our heart snapped in two and veined its way across the ocean,

The wind raging up through the valleys of the deep Pacific,

One on the Eastern shoulder, a region known for sunlight, waves, deserts and broken dreams

The other on the Western shoulder, a verdant valley known for the depth of its green rain and bone-stamina through war and flooding waters and foliage like a book of history,

And the sea grew wild and awind, carried us across the cold waters, like flotsam made jade in the sealight, criss-crossing each other’s path, railroading contours and contrails

And you were waiting, nearly two decades later,

Lined along the mountains inexorably as 青龍

The jungle-night drafting through pine-eyes and leaves in flags of breath

heading landward, sound and smacked,

light, and the palm cups of overgrown vegetation cupping the mist

we, again,

a mirrored room passing as guest love, the collapsed screen, bedbornloss

How we were born, long later.

How we are born of the veiny time,

How we gather, leaves lost in the dark October corner

Reborn through the shifting of selves, between all that was once a singular I

Which now becomes you,

Hours homeward in the hives that string across the lines of my fingerprints along the shore and stone of Da Nang,

My ghost finger unlocked and pricked your mouth wide as the sky,

your London lips sucked my aging skeleton back to life,

We danced against time and tile and buckled until late in the night and

fucked ourselves back to life

Reborn from the rattling of your voice fragile, cubes of ice rubbing against glass

British inflected, light and upturned like a cat bending a corner

your face scarred and pain-groved like the mud path your toes touched during typhoon days and clipped nights run over the puddles in your heart and streams behind your eyes:

less the memory, the chartreuse heart spans.

And so your friends ask what is it?

You look like you’ve seen a ghost

And the space transformed because of what we became, because of who you are

Because of the, the part that suddenly dropped mid-sentence,

Because we ran across nations and swam and fled oceans which fell in place,

Fell uncrippled into each other’s chambered heart and honeycomb mind, run wet in the wind:

Two ghosts, one silvered and the other blackened, bent and become one.

And I whispered onto your skin:

Collarbone, as beautiful as the celestial curve of falling stars, darkening in the slide of your light again and

Again

for: Mai Huyen Chi