Holly Descending the Stairs
“Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.” -Andres Neuman
She paws the door open from a forest of books, winds through the studio and dining room
a sentinel scenting the twists and dust with secrets, alert and atonce listening
squeezes through opening and breaks for light
shoeing upon clouds, pattering aside the warm, small paws still imprinted on her lap,
and counts like a cat, the steps: tap-tap-tap.
Here thoughts imaginate, rounding the streets bowed corner, where over her shoulder a window like a fishbowl
And the traffic bowls and burps and makes itself known to her
The potted plant all grown up and yet tomorrow will return to being a young adult.
You just missed your friend there on the wall's other side, still dreaming to be
a print-maker splaying up his seeing coloured fuchsia, parakeet and Cerulean.
There goes the second floor.
The landing which sags under the load of books still providing heatandcooled dreams for the gallery below: ballyhoo
a gallery abloom.
She is still descending
a constellation of poetry, a space of play and joy --
Bing Lee's drawings silent the way water flows, a soft whispering breaking,
And here comes Araki's mad maze,
while Christopher, with a chill March blow, sharpens Toronto in the fractured light,
Anothermainman's red-white-blue vase flowers the wide-widening horizon,
and Ping-kwan's poem writes our building upside down,
Luo Hui's sturdy translations dancing through the glass of the horizon’s front window:
Let's look back at the path that channels the rooms and our life:
Far a piece and yet as close as a view-finder, another’s colour-stirred landscape,
a hybrid of intelligence and bitterness, the tones of the formidable and the lowbrow.
Still, what lovely weather today,
Her poured sunshine after altitudinous rain, her hopes rich in their lighting,
a family’s almanac of joy and sorrow mixed together as if in a porcelain bowl
cracks veining the luminous afternoon.
All that light, remember?
She takes out his large-format toy camera, hand-made from wood.
Let's walk all the way east, the western fringe of Queen Street West
Toward Trinity Bellwoods Park and the home of our once cheerful neighbourhood.
You see that mythical spirit, hanging in the branches and watching the world twist
upsidedown and rightsidewrong
The Shan-Hai-Jin, a geography tracing human lines and markings,
the hums and hows of their life,
the Yuen-Oi annotation that we brought 30 years ago damped by time and distance and contrails
still speaks today a new perspective.
People recall the Sakura trees outside the library were once saplings come from the far-east
long ago, all our long agos.
The weekly, new releases that they picked up at the library
read like leaves from yesterday's branches which have become tomorrow's fruits and nuts
ripening in their fall.
Who still notices the last bloom of the flowers,
Not the pageantry of the initial outburst, but the colours being squirreled away by the grass once cut loose by the wind
a family of migration, immigrants from a yesteryear.
Today let me be your assistant and up-load the net-like film with joy and grace.
You who see through the Spring, pushing the shutter to capture the four seasons of our life,
The miraculous of the multifold into one:
our love a walk through the variation of translation
still being written on the pages of our lives,
folding.
For: Holly and Kasing Lee
