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
I
1986: Hooker's Green (a time for youth)
Chaiyi – Taichung- Kenting
And the years slip like breath along the edges of our skin, an abundance and a reckoning, the firmament spreads wide, like a gap-toothed space, dark and unending. Pitch and Pale above, all that which twined and coursed through you, comes forth like small accumulations. And then
I was here, fallen into a world that had not prepared for my waking—green was my Island home, green was the sound of my mother’s tears as I was born, green was the scent of the papaya my father fed her to assuage her fear, green was the sound of neighbors screaming in downtown Taichung, green was my vibrant heart, the rice fields and the stone rivers and the thumb in my mouth and the vegetables been hawked every morning, green the vegetable sellers voice with the sails of the morning, green of my mother’s grumpy breath and most importantly green of my grandmother’s eyes to me: emerald as the mountain cats and soaring hawks, she a keeper of the land and the maker of my heart.
Blindness, from the beginning, it snaked its way into my eyes and wording, and I could not tell the difference between day and night, between body and absence, between the sky and the ground, between winter and spring, between melon and dragon fruit, that swimming. There was only way to distinguish things when you are blind:
The movement and difference of temperature: our bodies laundered by the sea
and
the sea tugs at the stories splinter by splinter, tag upon bonerage ocean tag
seagulls pick at the ribs of a beached leviathan
alabaster space and stillness,
ligature and leftover and barnacled keel,
until life swells back into the sandy earth and runs away waving
and all is drawn back,
crescent and swelling
all the drowning taken under, lung by lung and we were
swell and as the coiled cold pierced our lungs
we tasted the brine back up inside us and upon our tongues
otter and kelp and elm and evicted spit, clams
and we collapsed.
Name it green and tossed up from the surf
The shells slipped over our shoulders and down our neck and the blood rivered on until the jetty of sand and stone unreeled,
And in the Cawl, the sea birds balked and the children reaned up and we
Seeds every moment
Took beach root.
In our drowning we saw bioluminescence and the light ran green as did our swollen tongues.
Once we’d lost the sea for salt, the Zhuoshui singled everything out
Singled and sang instead, name after name
And waves unbuckled and the ghosts spoke less forlorn
And into the inlet we went battering.
And the land grow quick and long underneath the briny touch
Rusted tackle and bait, wave wracked you:
Holding onto a wet sky and there we were, shine and bone and dream and aquagreen.
