Trois couleurs: 最好的時光
“Does the world have nothing inside but sorrow?”–Andrei Platonov
“On windy or rainy days, naturally there are times when these clocks would stop…”--陳黎
II
2014-2020: Phthalo Blue (a time for love)
Toronto – Taichung – Taipei – Toronto
Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.
This is how he snagged and snared, his blue eyes like Centaurea cyanus, cornflower wild in the field of his gaze and his words ran through me like my mother’s milk, for it was he who opened my taste to uncanny and wobbly things, surrendering my predilection for mistrust to care and leaps and undoing. Tangled trees our limbs became until I grew new roots that begun in the slow, waving of the east Beaches and scampered across oceans and feted itself over bowls of eels in Taichung and later singing to the distant mountains of the train station, lanterns guiding us along the spines and secret whispers of 九份, cats pursuing like jealous lovers, our hearts together, mine for the first time, in fire fettle and ferocious and he spoken as the sky curtained the sea: “the friscalating dusklight”, a strange love song I only learned later but that it how it began, all blue words and blue eyes and blue skies stretched over blue water and blue tea. Little did I know, then, our hearts would grow blue as well, blue as the rust on oiled, long gone steel, our hearts blue as the ghosts that carry their teeth in silk bags and render them mute, blue as the ache in his bones and his soon-to-stop raging heart, blue the color of his chest and railroading scar after his blue heart was scalped open and the black-blue valve, dead from the blue oxygen of which it was deprived and removed to be replaced by a mechanical blue-steel one and blue when I left our love and our city in the time of Covid.
Phthalo blue, where was the halo of our love and our life, blue-deaf everywhere: the lost blue faces on the streets, the leaving blue faces on the airplane, the made blue ocean on the southern sea, the raucous blue words of my mothers and aunt and the soft blue lullaby my dead grandmother sang to him one night, of which I would find out later. All blue.
The blue of the bitter melon, the blue of the magic and sea, the blue of the rain in Kenting, all gone now, or so it seemed. The blue leather flintcraw of our life, our words and teeth and bones, all laying in beds far apart.
Endings before the beginning had even blossomed, blue as the coal night, blue as the touch of your tongue on my body, blue as the Noctiluca scintillans familying at night along Taiwan’s islands, sparkling love and loss
藍色的眼淚
And then the ocean took us, as did life, all of it, gone. And I could see death’s disguise hanging on me.
But the colors had yet a surprise for us, blazing through the skystar in the shape and sweet sweep of wine.
In the swallowing of a new time and a new color and there it was lapping up everything in front of us,
waiting.
