Bagatelle and Babble
a fridaystrung rain words the city’s night and transient light
walkers browse puddles red with dream and damp as a young boy’s heart
pedestrian’s gossamer desire run with water and teeth and earthstone
are you the oxygen between the ruins and home
an old man cries in the corner of an afternoon room pale and purple
his body bent as a pot’s spout speckled
inside steeped memory pours as tea drip by drip
the sky hung humid with trees blue in their hope, you
long in the distance a barn door flaps like a parched tongue thick with thirst
this place that neither rhymes nor riddles your name the same
ghosts scribbling songs in the back of a tinker’s heart, the chatter of teeth in the throat
rivering death cuts debris luminescence with rising life in the blink of your eye, dreaming
to ride language to understand the vibrancy of ghosts
the walk shapes up the sea oats opening you rib by rib
an umbrella abloom and the house verdant with dancing brine
once the inert denied the generations before you, digging
the red door on your back opens to the sea and family tales
the magpies pinned on the clotheslines unbolt in the sun
the rust and salt beads wipe the hinges off the coast's white dunes waves
land breathes stories onto your lips and a peacock’s iridescent green rises on the hill leaving you
the oxcarts that once wobbled the Silk Road the dust buttoning the traveler's heart
the iron trains that sutured other continents’ wounds crisscrossing life and loss
in winter we sable the early morning, table our thoughts and forgetting
and we arise from the honeycomb flavour still stuck to our limbs, words the cruft of the problem
neat and aromatic lives long-nailed and scratching unclean streets and carpeted rooms
the pilgrims’ bent stories in the corners and the perfumed cobble street
how much further we go gathering the knitting and needles off the bedroom walls
neck and heart and the loss we crumbled into cookie shape shared long into the night
the world sized the mark of a thumb print on a marble
the accordion flaps of filament, the head’s aperture and click
the begin and began and the switching back and forth
the life that you carved from my weary body and the stars hung from my drought-dry mouth
the earth's veins oxygenate jade lungs
a nation’s swaying over the sargasso's spacious hymn
the sway and the song, a worded silence
damp over the hills and paved dark in the wood, remember
we pulled down Ursa Minor by our teeth and threaded together a home from constellation and celestial bone
for the poet Victoria Chang
