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
VIII. Hong Kong, 香港: Rooftops and Mouthtops
And who shall share in the joy under which the trees and shadow grow
There is no pronoun for me, the eye in the I, the her in the he
the dressing for the end, clothed in the typhoon, the ghosts emerging from the sea of the skulls backhoe, the back housing, the barking, the barkyard the backhoe singing
redux:
I am you who (plura) are thinking of journeys, our windward, fire-burned settlings, we hunger, ghost taste hungry, seed and flax set to flame and the crackle of ancestor, broken tooth, dappled stone and earth wing--
the East Coast of Taiwan, a forlorn train station in Taiwan: Duoliang 多良
piggybacking one family lilting home, this stop and step and de-railing, all its waving, undulating wayward aspiration, memories per which--Eastward bound, their heart grows wild from seed and surf and suffrage light our thirsty, voracious selves, the child fingering soot and scenic swipes, repeat,
the ghosts must be fed and so must we
There is no pronoun any longer
Shadowed by the lone tree
the rooftops of Hong Kong, the mouthtops of our singing of our bodies buckling into one another as we run through lane and life and galloping against one another in the street in the back rooms as our bodies are met by politic and bitten bruise, as we fuck ourselves into life as we run from being fucked by batons and boots and long upturned plastic choking of men, our hearts licking one another’s words and limbs all our desire a pointing toward something, to restore silence to the murmur of our consciousness, the life of this city. the stones in our pockets, sucked like lychee and pepper, the grey small pebbles we finger and place in on our tongues when we weary from July humid heat and the new leaders come down from the dragon city, familiar evenings return. Wandering in the early hours alone. The quiet magic one bares witness to. A portal into the mind’s eye. If only they could see there is no.
pronoun for me, dressing for the end, clothed for the typhoon
to rhyme the darkness with ringing, song and shell,
and the grattle and grass rattle beneath you
from the rooftops, the world
a kettle of ghosts, swaying
And you held the brass box lock oxidizing and stiffening
the matter of the matrilineal compass of the sky and the city:
your heart
hong kong, temper tiger, tempress lunar home
we eat. in order to eight, we ate into order right, we write in order to blacken through the deepened cave of trooping hate, from which no lo mein came, no vernacular self, no long rung wrong
to return to the echoing, the murmurs of silence, ringing
to return to the life belled fully in that city of language and light and liquid luminescence
alive and dying, alive and going, alive and leaving
heart flesh, ghost skull, housed beneath the umbrellas yellow
A fuselage of words, the rain of our temper and a rarity
or
rarely goodbyes, Hong Kong
your heart and your children alive and long in their running singing beside the sea
songs sung from the rooftops
your life, beckoning you from afar, downtown, uphilled, desperate, dispirited, delved, diaspora'd, ditched, a child between to translucent hearts held between him, the goldfish in each transparent bag, tied with ribbon, his body a cantilever, his arms the fulcrum of a scale, two golden marbles in two bodies of water, two goldfish, two stars, two hearts, two worlds, two languages, to times, everything about this magnificent city in that moment, before and after,
Two worlds luminous in the light of the goldfish-stretched water sketched in the golden fins, an alphabet of longing all along
afterall
your love songs sung and scattered from the rooftops of long away:
see this child going, the mother in her forest spruce cheongsam, deep green as the double-decker bus pushing passenger and pause, and going going gong gone,
your love songs sung from the rooftops of nowhere else but alas the only chorus that mattered
home
And who shall share in the joy under which the trees and shadow grow
home
your heart and your children alive and long in their running song beside the sea
