15th Floor

Pei-yuan counted them out.

One

Five

Ten

Fifteen.

The grimy gauntlet ground apart.

Pei-yuan’s knuckles rapped

Curtains ‘casing copper characters

Crammed, crimson, patchwork, papery

ink-brushed bats.

Hinges hung over a wire nook squeaked open.

A thousand kilometers, a pacific away

From home

Only to find herself back there again.

Her feet scraped out of pink sandals

Bright over bamboo

Strewn on a straw mat.

She slid into soft slippers

Shuffled to a splintered sill

Fur flattened under her feet.

Pei-yuan peered, pupils piercing smooth glass

Seeing strangled, smoky city

Steel surrounding the sky.

Shining laminate, sandpapery leather.

The child sat on creaking springs

Puckered lips pecked her pale skin.

Wrinkled hands

spotted, veined, threadbare

Tapped worn mahjong tiles on the table.

streamlined, vigorous, thorough

Grandmother traversed the tightrope

Between bull-like persistence and boorish pugnacity.

Her precision, the most important virtue, of course

Without which, she would not have plotted a safe course

From Communist-congested China to tower-filled Taipei.

Her knack for planning ahead

Passed to the head of the second generation

Her son

Who built, tile by tile, stack by stack

Tap, tap, tap

A job, a house, a family

Foundations falling into a foreign nation

With only

The clothes on his back and two suitcases.

Whatever the case

Grandmother’s barbed tongue still chastised him

Table for mahjong, not his feet

Also, lose more weight.

The child, physically younger

The ancestor, mentally faster

A lesson, Pei-yuan promptly picks up.

Age is a temporary supremacy

Her hands will grow

Spotted, veined, and threadbare as well

Intellect, however, is immortal.