Leaving Taichung Station

 

The Cemetery for the Companionless

“You can call me a thief if you like, a thief of ceremonies”--Fleur Jaeggy

red lanterns sway upon the hip of night in guard of landlords who proffer unease and damp lungs 

in search of firefly and candle and those who might be, forever her, hungry in the alley sway--

pictured and scampering and aflight,

you dug in and dug upon the bone rags of the city, crepuscular and carnal from lost peace

even-tiding the long lampposts, the barking pull of the food market stall for single evenings, 

wet bones twig and stretch from window’s scratch, branches just so, 

the twilight calligraphy kneels down next us and softens the soil, green with cadaver and lunglost night, 

their voices adrift, your rowing twilight 

eddies and names a shoaded and spaded vein upon the hillside, 

our ocean bed looking over the forlorn & foretold place, the poles of winter precarious in their certainty 

is it some graveyard singing

the chanting ocular and the disappearing gust along the rakes, 

the life here in the high-browse corner of the city, our life a pandemonium of rust

the ghouls pandemic and the letters we marked red in the candlelight and our unsewed trust--

recall when your mother struck you and the sun went unglued, undiscussed.

now risen, the chaperoned evening unbuckles right, negotiated kettles of time and weeds upturned 

a listing of a future nest, alright: 

to rhyme the darkness with ringing, song and shell,

to grattle and grass the rattle between an elbow and the oxbow of concordant you
to rooftop the tarred city lights

to unshovel the world a kettle of ghosts, swaying and singing up barley brick

--the pail of all this going clanging against the cedar doors and slab block walls, rhyming the night blue.

a turn of the clock and a porter held a brass box, face lock 

oxidizing the stiff and the matter of the matrilineal 

a pocket compass ticking the sky calendar and the city longitudinal and longing: the dead babies 

the rambling cats in the dirt, the bottles tossed onto the sky, the secrets needled along the riverbank 

the cacophony of oblivion tapped out in the orchestra of your heart and cobblestone feet:

there is no pronoun any longer shadowed by the lone tree

there is no pronoun any longer unkeyed

there is no pronoun any longer

there is no pronoun

there is no, any longer

behind us brevity, dissolution, cheer her at last, 

the torn glove, the darkened skirt, the innervated boot and your verbs running release

an interlocking, blurrish enumerated vocabulary and we poured, 

sinewy and artery and word puzzle,

all of us, some of you and a clove of me, together untackled and wettened, 

poured out forever and into our some canine limitlessness--

a cemetery for the companionless.

yet their lives scribbled-up foam, a spew down from the body into a golem shaping

this inconvenient world and the alchemy and the algebra and the clocks of Middle Asia

our preternatural dipping and dampening, earth to worm and soil to ephemeral, 

the divesting and the marriage of all we know and would become, swarming our-ward

you and I and all the rest, bedfellows and heaven’s crew, and ocean wrek

the outbreak of us downing and coming alive long after our bones and sinews into the sable 

the indeterminate eternal sea.

for: Holly and Ka-sing Lee