一一 Yi-Yi
台灣: The Raindrop in her Ear
May they remember their days uncording
as the sea secrets in his eyes a lifetime of turns, tactile
Yushan raindrops jade her ear, silver shells awaiting the rhyme in the wave of the ocean’s netting
a braid socking each-to-each, ankles and toes snucktuck on the beach
the food they fingered as flora and fauna upon a table of entwined driftwood and bone, each other
grass, light lanterned, wordfever,
fear’s flight tracking mouths which recalls the world, accordioning
the lights harbouring on the shoulders of the Pacific’s distance, New Territories
alone in a breached moment as boulders above slip their purchase,
it may be their hearts or an unbuckling
“your stitching unbelted me” he scribbled “and loosened time,”
“your tongue wagging long in its linger, unsure!” she snapped back.
What is gone in the untying of 10,000 minutes?
What was to be gone?
What was once lost in the language, together
remains still Rhodophyt on the rock, loamy and aquatic
abundance of absented time and the wind that pricks their spines under the soft breath of tide-rivers, leaving
unlost and rounding, an oxbow of dream and beveled circumstance,
calamity forever bound.
Yet there along the whorl of the island’s margins, they remain arched in privation’s embrace,
dexterous, irreducible and concomitant in their arms, in their shackles and their waving
forlong.
香港: Enfolded into the Sea
fire in the fields nimble in its nibbled night,
the breath’s palimpsest of saplings and crackled tin,
you slippery in your nightgown and iridescence
passing mirrors radiant of loss in the rooms and along alleys where cats bark at one another
the heart mad in its spiney undoing
the batons and umbrellas and boiled noodles bubbling as rain
teeth grinding under the sheet of sleep, ghost stories and canaries from the faucets--
this land
later
he bites your bruised lips mistaken for tenderness,
you spat at him dryly but the unspooling words grew dewey and darned, your metamorphosis
mistaken belief for ecumenical bargaining--
the apocryphal panhandling of love, the rights stuffed in the back of the drawer
a house burned down and language left in the shape of a key, dangling
later
he guides her face through the shipwreck of his ribs
her fingers trace gold circles on his jaw, ecumenically
they seed the struck wounds of bruise that came from the street, quick as light
later,
she licks his panicked ears, hinder
alchemy a tongue risen from the sea:
lemongrass, star anise, dill, beefbones, temple incense
weeds from the hills: Luo Sang Tang
singing scent stirring a skeletal rhyme, the laundry of love
finally,
her kisses ripen by relic and briny depth
abloom in an algae night
neither longed for poetry but carved stanzas into each other,
rooms filled with argot and cloudy articulation, Nazca lines,
the panoramic view above their bodies
an early-winter Saturday and an elongating amid snow,
fall away desert love, fall away--
coincidental?
And the earth and their burdens folded into the sea.
for two poets: Amang Hong and TimTim Cheng
