Hong Kong: Songs from the Rooftops
“In these shaken times, who more than you holds
In the wind, our bittermelon, steadily facing
Worlds of confused bees and butterflies and a garden gone wild”
--梁秉鈞, Bittermelon
I. Kowloon: Threshers
child afield
whose scattering words fern against the cowlick'd sky
and couple as crayon, cadmium and Chrysanthemum
the loam caught far and afire
and then this:
fernweh.
the wall’d in simultaneous,
the man chumming along the cracking field of the world
watching afar and fecund and rotating
knocks over a tablet of pebbles and spins
the harrow along soil and bone and root-memory
until he bends, like the loam undressing from the rusted wheel,
and gloves the traces the child had stamped along the ground's shore just prior
and whose prints now rise up from the earth bed
as alchemy and indelible letter and as conjuring breath.
Pressed against his face, the white roots redress the cloth and seed
which prior had gone lost, a consolation
the broken bottle aquant, the weeks bronzing of white shirts in the hallways
the cigarettes scattered like small rat bones in the corners
each of us, the sparrow’s wing.
And in that instant, a small vein of stain burls across his finger
and he runs
or maybe both man and child are running, a branching and telescoping,
toward that thinning weave in the distance
the light in the barn's corner watermarked by the damp
scent
of rick and straw and bucket trap:
the words for which remain
un-penned.
