Damp the Dream of Taipei
“…the mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall.”--Hopkins
“Morning digestion flies like a bird.”--Larry Fink
In
Autumn, rain ticks benumbed language along the fingers of Dadaocheng
stories gallop down the mountains as loosened earth
the divesting of the name you were once given in a doorway
bathed in green water from a blackened bowl, your teeth of the earth
and still tin in the late, an old man sits at a bar licking at peace and longing
bowed over the end, a brass coin slowing its spin down,
down the foliate rain spilling over the table as he winces
and clarity walks out the door,
life --
verdant dreams unbuckled, you uncluttering.
In
winter, a child bares beneath the snow and glaciated life
the damp light chirring toward a drowning glove, crushed beneath boot and ball,
as he pulls himself out of the wet world, broken into a frame of the cocktail’s Edwardtime,
and scampers through the woods
his father a ghost picking at a speakeasy’s rusted door,
the home’s window a square heart carved from crazed carpentry,
grandmother once an apparition who understood the agitated from the aggregate, love
blooming genome picked apart and ribboned,
our former life still cascading the mountain’s down:
the elder’s song and warning, morning digestion flies like a bird
and we once were, gone.
In
Spring, a night’s chrysolite hair lost amid the algae of the gutter,
the moon awakened as the clock rounds the bend of its homegoing,
and there, damp and lost, stood stools empty of body and shadow, our exited tales
firecrackers burned and left ash in their dying, dropped dragons droopy of their past--
Auntie promiscuously reading the world upside down,
once lost over a glass of Kaoliang and schnapps,
the mournings we survived,
the whale bone and the package that arrived in the front yard, the auspicious year,
Daddy’s ribs sing in the sand of the graveyard land
so you walked left out the door with a blackened hand
and the scooters ran wild and red in the dark cyan--
was it only us, was it?
In
Summer, corners cool temperatures soften the exertion of thoughts ragged, you
but the wind an extra set of arms, picking the cotton from your arms
in the distance your grandmother stood beneath the Banyan tree, singing
toward the clouds and cicada, the scampering spiders upturned umbrellas
the sky exploding, the clap of a herd of pigeons taking the air in unison
pachyderms in wing, your heart song unfolding as expectation, still:
the sea and sky scar your voice as it grows verdant on the mountains of your grandmother’s dreams
disarmed, we remain this refrain.
In
Spring, once more coins fall and ring, the oolong brews high in the clouds of dew, my love
Komm du, du letzter
and all the loss dross, the tackle and porcelain and the losing
but then again on the horizon
come you.
For Wan-lin Yang, our Grandmothers and Larry Fink
