Letter Home
“the currency of suffering”—Yam Lau
Once
even in the dark recesses of bramble and cave light
breath spidered across an old alleyway bumpered and bricked-up
the scooter gears like bone treasure, the left-behind scarf of teens teetering in the night
the wing of the drunk cat skeletal in the corner,
out and about as shadow orbits the red-written walls
in the moon-early morning on a damp sheet night trapped
between the fridge and the cask of cachaça carried longitudes,
the moolah marked up in the old woman’s hands, satellites
the abbot asking from a hat for snake blood and coin
and
between the tofu set up with oil, his eyes set us tumbling
in the night the burnished path, a picking away of threadbare words and tatters,
the names they called out, centrifugal,
the orbits their bodies scribbled, inward
the world down the valley gaping outward, a portent
“I laid down against the anger trapped along the rail as a train stood up in the dark”
and chagrin boiled on the stove and the aunt’s temperament rusted the door hinge
the barking gone on up the hill and the mail scampered black in the rain
the temple red oiled and the lantern anger relieved each of the night walkers,
home for the holiday and the hearts in Mailiao grew into coins for the taking
away.
The veins bewitching the legs of the entangled forest somewhere far in the distance
Penghu lost upon your young skin, the ignition of the fishing boats far past the shore,
red bobbles and starburst winging and she opened:
her many limbs, multitudinous breathe that carved the sky with tackle and knife—
were we through, were we?
Earlier
the crept innocence of the elbow, the bow in the bend of the back, softening
the moles and the wayward strand of the hair,
contraction and contradiction in the book wings that tell a greater vulnerability:
the tenderness of stars, the tenacity of the headland’s stack and pull,
and she turned the corner and headed to Chiayi,
wagging the prowling mouth of the shadows like a wolf who hadn’t gnawed on a bone in months
and toward her unkempt mother's spattered wings inimical in their lent sting
her entire life the waxwing fallen unexplained and pivot marks print-stained.
Later
the bearers banged her basket across the floor on the way to entombment
banshees brittle up the bringing air
and there you stood mama when you were still a child of twenty
grandfather in the ground, grandmother wading in back, dad running dates in his head
and I of unrecognizable thought caught up in the air
the family, the congregation, the liturgy like hair fallen from the Taibao temple's saplings under a breeze
all that long ago, the age of trees or the bruise behind the bush
the currency of grief we learned to exchange each of us somehow benign
long tumbling and ruffled
yet all along,
breath.
