The wrinkles on the yellow face
of the papers he carries, conform
to his narrow hips. His pockets
swell from a volume of Li Po, stones; a paintbrush
dribbling on the tail front of the borrowed shirt
he wears when he can to hide the skin
above his bruised collarbone,
strictures of coarse rose, in a photograph,
tunneling into the marrow.
This is no simple mug shot, no words
of dissent written across his forehead: a young
dark-haired boy passed out in a schoolyard.
Guangzhou is underpasses beneath stairwells
behind concrete blocks, sodden, smoldered—
the day they become homes there are no words.
His father’s dress shoes
are caked in slick black shoe varnish
and loose dirt from no sidewalks, no pavement—
only dull earth, darkness tied to wood, paraded,
thrown into jail cells with cement overhead
and surrounding, the frontispiece of the manifesto—
one light, one chair, and no end of rope; there is only
one place to rest your head at night.
On the drive from Nanjing to Shanghai
where dissent began and shuddered
towards the metallic spine of the waterfront,
I speak to myself in uncertain tongues, as the woman beside me
talks of this place, 43 years before we walked: a soldier,
round face, smooth-skinned Jap, dragged the last few
yards of entrails from her mother, striations of bile
left on the wrong side of the road. The postcards in the street carts
on the road leaving Nanjing and much later, in Beijing
are not of my grandfather who left for San Francisco in 1923
before upheaval. He did not want the glory of having survived,
his letters to his wife are stricken
with eloquence, she receives envelopes
without words, pledged to die in his homeland;
she is too demure to even be unskilled.
The god of war who stands before every pagan doorway
to the right of the quiet eyes of Guanyin—sexless, artless
figure—holds a serrated blade and a snake,
one in each hand; the snakes’ head is lost. The grey entrance,
the ruthless sneer decaying within politics that leaves
no corpses, only trails missing
ends to stories shuddering to a close.
Her lips turn in profile
to the dust rising over a road
where she is too young to recall for certain
if their house once stood;
one could think of the families
outside on the bare plot of red clay that cakes the ground,
one child running out to brace her hands around another,
to trap her in tenderness, mosquito netting for fingers,
ink on silk scroll for Nanjing
but this is Hangtzu, crossing a bridge
where the water beneath
courses red. She could have come across, trading
rape for parchment, ink block, bookmark,
words in pictures containing some patina
of truth but the photograph I hold burns the insides.
The man could be wearing
the same red I have imagined all this time
but I am riding this bus with only myself and
a handful of memories, not even my own, who might
hold my hand in late afternoon into the predestined sun?
The press of wrinkles that have appeared
across the map held by the tall, thin girl
who blankets her voice over the passengers who took this bus
from Changdu, is forgetting the history:
beneath this tree, the trunk of its body
worshipped the passing of the poet
who wrote, drank, and drowned in the river,
humming the words of a song to the moon
or about it, but I cannot sing it, not in Mandarin,
not anymore than I can in any other dialect—
the song must be pressed into the rocks along the riverbed,
that I may find it if my footing
is sure and does not slip as a man
has before I could claim his as my own.
***
(this was originally written as a writing exercise based on a michael s. harper poem for poetry class circa 2006. recently, i found a draft of it in an old notebook. i tried to revise it a little but one of these days i will have to find a more polished version of this among my piles of paper back home and work from there.)
