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
IV. Yau Ma Tei: 萬里: 失踪,
A certain photograph, once 125:
hung upon the wall like the ossified remains of a prehistoric bird in search of lost flight, a belly-bowed coat hanger in mute conversation with the nob of a steel nose'd nail: two geometric universes moving toward their impossible marriage and entwining: the heroic hope of our imagination's refusal to acquiesce.
A certain photograph, once 86:
rooms have gone, scattering. And yet there you are, remaining, my love, your heart green as what we dreamed our city would be,
once.
A certain photograph, once 27:
in the end, what else but the jade world surrounding, a bonsai as old as grandmother in the back room, the early autumn reeds, her lotus awakening in late August, lily pads and cathedrals, the thin morning light and the wind rhyming through us as a lost yellow umbrella octopus hung in the torn wind:
A certain photo album, once 69:
embossed traditionally, weathering on the hallway chair, collecting the dust of long gone stories and grandmother’s lullabies as you rode the neighbor’s dog like a horse, and the old man upstairs whose smoke yellowed your balcony and chocked off your Euphorbiaceae that had stood the time of a small cage with a black-tooth companion during the time of re-education and nannies dentures fallen to the floor beside her bed, an apt deculturing loss, and Ting’s older brother who never made it past the age of six, fell himself to a wet season fever and ended the calm of the building when his small head swooned scarlet and he fell down the stone steps sounding all the way down the seven flights, pass the widow’s shrieks and gull skywalks, the spit left drying on the metal oxidated banisters, the alabaster paint chips folding up and crumbling like Fan-Fan’s song and at the bottom another child stood up in despair and look up, and all around there was left, past the pooling blood and splintered hair and the scratch mark and bitten cement, a lone tooth left rooted with bronzed blooded roots and later that night, as the mother terrorized the walls with grief, the father lay beneath the moon and cigarette smoke and remember once, his child, singing himself to sleep, and all of that now gone beneath the laundry hanging black and the lunar light hanging okra colored and the tea stain and then this: in the afternoon late, 10 years of collecting and grieving, the ghost clock handworking each of you until
a small ache stirs—
and a child’s tooth, between each of you,
drops.
A certain photo album, once 1:
soon
there goes it all, the child racing toward the sun and sea nets, an old man being taken up the mountain in a blue porcelain urn, flowers falling to the earth like cut wigs, and the prayers under the plane’s ascent, all that and all the while
a train in the liminal distance serpentine swinging past Tai To Yan as the clacking goes onward and the tears of the young mother continue and the street vendor and in a moment, time stops and the world suspends the light and your mouth finds a new tooth where once one was lost, the miraculous in a city too long wearied by jade and fishoil and peppers and thin black ties and full black hair and dreams drowned in fishbowls late at night, after an old man on a rusted brass seat, once an elephant’s foot, alone past the girls heel’d shoes clacking, plays two songs on two of his 塤, , xun and shun and shone, now gone in the tea of our memory.
Listen,
there goes a train, here comes my heart.
