Leaving Taichung Station

 

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

VI. Kwun Ton: 觀塘區 , Birds Clapping

We awoke
6am the birds clapping the thin morning light
into the first raising in 3 days of rain

into the first opening in which I do not think of birth
days, slicking
the eyefocus shimmer as mirage, the dropped I
water buffalo eyewinking long in the distant horizon, so too they and all now awakening.

We watch the curtain in our bedroom lung in and lunge out in unfocused breath, recall
a tear
up a moment
listen
for the earthworms singing up their group, a murder of black hyphens in the sky

the new dandelions pop
as the night’s oxygen bubbles from underneath, going in their longing,
at the birds cacao
An alluring song

ca·coph·o·nous

death

sometimes you just want to be,
quiet in language

Death

sometimes we just want to be,

silent in song

So
you re-read, test anew, an extraordinary tea-stained page

poems multiplying back the book--
we are alive this am. 

The opaque Saturday morning silvering soon.

The same cannot be said of everyone who has entered and exited your life, the breaks

of life, or porcelain verbs and inherited vases, 

your hope, my heart,
Perpetual
Ly
the gone, the songs, the scars, the reappeared and reassembled.
All those lives, the mahjong and the sextoy store, the old man teething his tai chi poems

and no one listens, only the birds
Sentence Eliminations.

Multiple Choice

Strung up, thrown out copper coins with an eye of emptiness pressed out in the brass

the void around which the wheel moves toward the hand and food pressed in a slot

and all those birds.

The birds
The light kept appearing
The going keep going
and

you put life down for a moment 

this morning an old book dusting on the shelf, tea cup red with lip stains

this morning

The birds clapping, 

The birds winging,

The birds coming,

The birds clamouring, 

and the birds keep, still

Birds

listening silently, aloud and around you

still.