The Only Scarf in the World, Most Beautiful

The Only Scarf in the World, Most Beautiful

i

Close your eyes:

At first the child cannot distinguish in the early morning light whether the soft color at rest upon the sand is the discarded skin of fruit, worn cloth fingered expertly by some grandmother’s hand for the skull or a drift of shell surprisingly gold. Though he knows not yet the words, this child understands that the morning light, like confusion or stupor, is neatly democratic. The drunken green waves, the jade clouds, the juniper hills, the sage seawood, the parakeet heart climbing up his throat. Without question, he admits to himself that the golden object is all he needs this day, running before mother and father have awakened and particularly each moment, dazzling in the winds. In fact, it is a simple scarf, perfumed with a familiar scent, the color of spring pineapple freed from the night before. He entangles himself with as if made for his neck, but he intuits that it was meant for a woman and he bends, like willow or crabgrass in offshore breeze, bowing his body as he stares at the cloth, the sea, the sky and horizon calling and in that moment, this six-year old waits and listens. The world expands, in that moment, with the sea.

Along the beach, teachers coaching after-school activities are toasting fire to the limbs of driftwood and the wind whistles toward 千里眼 and 順風耳 as Mazu sits upon her onyx throne listening to the sea and waits as folk bring to her home-grown bananas and red candles lit with devotion: Dragon's Blood, Frankincense & Myrrh, Patchouli, Precious Lavender, First Rain, and White Sage. Shrimp being hualed up from the sea’s belly, lovers stealing kisses in front of the vendors, grandmothers barking out instructions between bite and laughter and the little ones refuse to listen as they await their mothers, their fathers already drunk on warm beer. And the light dampens and the day sings obsidian.

So begins his day.

ii

His mother saunters into the light, wearied from the drinking the night before and watches him kite over the sand, not in the naming of light uncovered on a beach but in the pouring of tea, rich and chartreuse spreading warmth in a room that has cooled throughout the night, her body and head opening cavernous and unmistaken. Knob of honey, her tongue the taste of salmon soup and salted squid and forlorn kisses slipped away and swallowed between the closing of the refrigerator door, the dressing prior of the dreaming beach-bound child’s simple lunch and the remembrance of the dog’s name, last night run away. Somewhere, sometime, she will recall without labor the stony taste of Yilan whiskey, but for now a time-country away. But the taste will remember her. Count on it.

And she says, low as the horizon, to herself, my bloom fades quickly in the milky morning though I wish to flower as long as the kneeded soil, fecund and carving time and shadow running deep through Mama’s milk, blazing to the fall of the last sound as the scarf later recalled when slightly panicked in the morning shower. She will recall that she had misplaced her anniversary gift but has forgotten where. Last night, a month previous, a year, this eternity? Its loss will not trouble her as this moment, for her heart, as she looks out the window, as rusted silver because she cannot recall when and now where, a token of what was dreamt of by her mother-in-law and promised by her husband, a gift foresaken. And Fear awakens and washes up, she thinks, as laughter. But these are thoughts which occur to her hours long later, when the tea’s scent again returns to her tongue and reminds her of burnt bamboo and riche damp in the banana leaves. But for now, she can only attempt to see and listen for him from the blown open window, trying to recall the dog’s name but then tripping as she sees him racing over the rocks and sand and she hurdles through the front door. Soaring.

So begins her day.

iii

He is never so complicated nor softly complete.

He awakes to the scent of apricot, dried toothpaste and carnivorous dreams, both his son and wife gone, this simple life. So, he kicks himself out from underneath the sheets warmed by the Spring sun hung high already as the goddess razors his boat in the port worrying, shaking as if a dipped in the icy Pacific, cold as the pears in December groomed by sea water and mountain outpouring. His feet, numb, touch an even cooler tile floor and it only gets simpler, he thinks, and watches himself waver in the plum mirror of the television still buzzing news, his reflection stolen as the light in the subway window above the streets in the long lost city, soot for eyes, smile for tears, his desire battered between the drive from Su’ao to Taipei. Then the spreading sound and he hears his son’s voice across the rocks, skipping upon the beach clutching to something his eyes cannot quite focus upon. “It must be a scarf, most beautiful” though he does not at first understand why he says this to himself. He can hear his child’s wildly expectant voice reach and then in the distance it closes and his heart drops, in that instant, something has left and he sees his son grown up, racing over the hill far in front, far in the distant, far ahead and he realizes he will never catch him and he wants to scream how much he loves him, how much he has pancaked his life to this moment and he will never express it more precisely. My son is growing and leaving and my heart will never be so strong again, as I age and lose that which I love more than the roots of this land. And he sits down in front of the wind and catches his wife, she too running toward the swell, and he suddenly, without expecting, weeps.

So begins his day.

Shale shell the night song, the summation amid the normal that has broken free and he is afraid.

Open your eyes.

iv

But that was long ago—

The vanity clear through the wires transmitting prayers overhead, winged words in the shape of evening birds at sea, the sound of the floor boards tapping the chirp of the heart, the soul trembling and yet life still occasions the miraculous, still occasions the voices weaving about the autumn grass on the hills, small pebbles hardening into mineral and rattling like a cup of teeth in the fishermen’s town, bricking and braking inside the circumference of each of us. The beach treasure-hunter child now a man and that morning, a opaque memory that he tries to piece together as he sits and writes, words and body close together, rivering through death toward life, in the blink of an eye. He says to himself, open your eyes. They are gone. They shall not return no matter the algebra of your wanting as the sky opens, again, as body green with hope and he turns to the light and he pivots an alphabet in his mind and, though now tears are welcomed, he realizes that moment and forever forward, he is finally

Opened.

For: Wan-lin Young and Ling Ang