flags for sunrise, 婆婆
“They all say you’ve gone away. But you didn’t tell me where you went. I guess it’s someplace you think I should know. But, Grandma, I know so little. Do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don’t know. Show them stuff they haven’t seen. It’ll be so much fun. Perhaps one day…”—Yang-Yang, 一一, Edward. Yang. (楊德昌)
天公疼愚人
imagine capricious reader the body
burnished by the choral of teeth, ice and wave(s)
all the double-dutch, dice-rolling bones
the coining, the coming and you there in the corner window vacant eyes and dipping
swelter the light that spiders across the lip-upcoming, the knot off-tune
downward you guard and they go fast along the line in the distance
the cortex, the codex and the cerebellum minutemen switch'd unhitched
when the flag unfurled in the turn of a winch
Wulai stories pour through a black kettle, dragon teeth-iron tumbling over
the bow of the teahouse children lip their hearts over the precipice tumbling the lungs precipitation unbuckled above the knees
Tui bao zu the sound of the neighbor’s keys lecturing the door lock heartbreak at sunrise gone long
the anthem in the woods dug up
children ditched the rain-stained ditches and leapt at low
language bargained over A-Ja ice-cream rolls, lovelanguage’s’ peanut heart
a four-chambered
Jiufen grandmothers’ heads unbuckle in the serpentine alleys
sails on the horizon stones cut by wind along the hill’s pasture
where you too fled awkward large victories
meaningless in the pockets of small disappointments
tumbling through the mountain forest
the sap the tree blood inked forever on the tongue forever on the tongue, forever
long in the night a star falls from a thread over Cape Breton
the lobstermen’s dreams most magnificent unbuckling
a sounding for miles, round miles from one island to another
go long Daytona, go long over the endzone dredged up in the dark
the park bronzed with seaweed the current pulled in and the gulls dropped off on their climb
a flag for sunrise smiles sank longly across the sea
as a child’s sun-bronzed heart falls down the tent pole
arms of songs picket teeth scuttled from the skull’s hope, long
in the ground we go, and the rhyme life of longing’s litany, oblong
the scuttlebutt in a cup of tea
Chiayi in the dark recesses of bramble and cave, light liquids off the moon along a thread of silver'd
grandmother’s vegetables bubble in the bottom of a stall-stained bag
path to Sun-shooting Tower sings, upward
outward the years slip like vice alone along the edges of our skin
an abundance, a reckoning the firmament spread wide, her stories
a gap-toothed space, dark and unending , pitch and pale along Martyr’s Tower
that what which twined and coursed through you
questions in the air the oars in the water
dip in the darkness like small accumulations
and then we set our hearts, firmly flags at sunrise
winking in the wind the lyrical, the loss
the rise of grief they both go about walking your ground is grown through
and we all shake out our ankle bones and the world’s round off
and now you are, off toward cadence and conviction
Recordar: to remember; from the Latin re-cordis, to pass through the heart1
uncertain reader you are too now
positive proof positive
go long go long go now, the breath
as we set our hearts for the breaking.
1Eduardo Galeano
for: Edith J and Huan K, 婆婆
