Gather, gained
rain scratches her nails against the window of the train, the music of loss dressed in a coat of desire as light scars left-over summer, the shy undercut of a September sky and our hearts go running before we step away from the platform, brisk leaves in our fists, a nob of Taiwan tea falling with a soft rasp from the corners of your mouth and then you fall1
1we fell as that rain once lumbered down the mountain when your parents skirted their vows prematurely
language nets in the catch of one another, a union with the birds above, their wings batting together clap up the sound along the peaks like tongue and teeth, squawks scrape porcelain across the carriage table and death2 grows thin along the cliff-walk north of Hualien
2the Pacific growl off the shoulder while inside the passengers’ hearts bow, awaiting
the earth beneath the sailors feet rumble on floorboards, the gambled gambol in the gale offshore, their names a stone’s throw away as the crows fly, soon the prayers pebbled forever with the dead, the cartography of lives inked with the remains remained
torn with the steel and tin along the Eastern path awaiting the broken sea, the world, a room of light just right, camera lucida dreams, the screams of a daughter once cut at the knees when her father stalked about her prayers the predator in through the door when he had lost his heart at the snooker table and between the stripper’s lips, his hopes went spinning, her slippers and bento box now through the window and her dreams supine3
3gone gone gone
you know this right, one day the land’s stories run roughshod over the tribe’s reconstruction, the nation’s reckoning as time nurses the shoreline’s wounds until the serpents sit up and take notice, one day memory and language gone missing and dovetailed with the trees and bees long ago long ago and once we were endless4
4as the west coast spun decades into dresses and recipes and hymns for the lost
remember we bucked sorrow and placed bets against our narrow selves and the house, learned to recognize we were all lost, the countenance of our daily shifting ways in the rotation of the train’s and amid the wreckage, your heart rainbow hued and the hopped-on-hope as you searched among the debris5
5a tribe elder pulls apart the small intricacies of a granddaughter’s body and expels a beat6
6the bite of his howl,"When shall we realize what awaits us"
what else, if not that, when once we gathered along the path of the old iron line Eastward forever awaiting the broken sea, alone and beastly, songs bereft and we tried to go on, forever on7
7and death gathered in our arms and the stars buttoned up their dress coat and love forgot what was gone
Love the backwoods in which we collaborated in the remnants and grief fell to pieces and the world picked itself back up8
8the land in which we re-assembled and the moon took back in its arms what was owed
