GHOSTS AND THE GOLDEN FALLS OF THE YING-YANG SEA

GHOSTS AND THE GOLDEN FALLS OF THE YING-YANG SEA

黃金瀑布

winter’s wounds

sewn together by tender roses

exhausted fingers

almost touching the stars that skim the water

the storm fills my sleeves

like grieving mercury distant happiness

like a sharp knife slicing at my heels

—Wang Yin 王寅

Prelude: Enter

I

The Oxen rid of their sun ranging in the shade of the trees, the hills, the dark and then a light brush,

a shadow before it has been forestalled, this swaying.

Calves, children, boys, brothers swaying in the sun.

II

The Sea has a hunger of its own just as the mountain

whose viridian body rusts from the gold that blooded

through the serpent falls

bone and clay and iron that drop like teeth from an old ghost's starved body,

mining the troubles over and inside you.

Remember when you stood and turned to the spread and fanning beneath,

the sea drinking up the white foam and spitting back the past with the iron

and the mountain's phosphorus hope.

It was then you became like a dragonfly set loose.

Later you closed your eyes amid the wind-snapping of cameras and tourists,

shivered and turned like softened bamboo

for you could not explain to the family and the strangers and the wind,

that your body belonged to the sway and cascade.

Your heart part of the tongue-lick and brine of the double syllable'd waters below.

So you climbed until your sight matched the earth's fickle desire.

In that moment of shutter snapping and world whirling you opened.

And you leapt.

Is it possible that I remember for you?

You stood like a pole at the opening of the mountain's mouth

the roared water and rancid rust and the vegetative mist,

the scars and undulations tatooing the plates that shifted from miners and geology,

its appearance all root and knot and woody hair,

cascade as dreadlocks, twists like Monokoke

and all pulled out of its sleep by the sea's hunger.

The land does not sleep and the ghosts do not feed but there they are:

the scars that lay like an alphabet long before the miners from Japan came

to sword it open and scavenger it up.

But you remained for love.

Later, before the car doors shut like an old barn, you stood

as if you too were of the dead and streaming

and reached for my hand and spoke:

"Tourists come for romance and to chalk off the boredom of their days

but I came to make peace with the lovers who fought over me before you."

Tooth and tongue and tick:

You made it so.

That night you lanterned along the alleys of 九份

in search of dumplings and red silk and Mahjong partners.

Each stone like the first syllable in a child's vocabulary

the beat of poppled tea, eyes like candled calligraphy against a door.

Each sound was a tongue slipped into a mouth

serpent or leaf dampened by the sea's spray.

In this nation, old women say that the land tells stories but that the sea withholds them.

What then to make of this island home of stories and sellers and withholders

the strollers and the statues and the steadied loss marking us?

III

And the years slip like breath along the edges of our skin, an abundance and a reckoning, the firmament spreads wide, like a gap-toothed space, dark and unending. Pitch and Pale above, all that which twined and coursed through you, comes forth like small accumulations.

And then.

IV

Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.

It begins with the knotted sound of a bell rung in a temple, the clap of something indistinguishable that takes flight, the flutter of a golden silk robe, the tap of a market cart’s wobbly-kneed wheel, the bark scattered in the distance, the inviolate movement of an old woman’s hands across the ravine of a green fruit, the bellow and the bought bough, gone-gong, left out in the tropical rain for too long.

V

It began with the knotted sound of a bell rung wrong in a temple, the flutter of a golden silk robe and the line on an old woman’s hand who once spoke:

You will live as long as bird at sea.

VI

A firefly hums inside the hive of a red lantern

And the albion rushes inside the cove between our words

And the tectonic touches each of us in its gathering and swelling.

And am I simply dreaming all of this as I wait for you?

Your rusted mountain stream impregnates my stubborn, aquatic body.

The effluvium of our lives spit forth like ink upon rice paper

and the children who will not make it yet to this life haunt us.

And we remain, like the water fireworking from the mountain,

agape.

Red, rusted lantern

fingering over The Ying-Yang sea,

you to me,

燈籠

燈籠的海.

Set that to flame.

For all things disappear,

but in their washing remain and turn our loss into broken languages

bodied by the syntax of rain.

VII

We are pictures rendered.

Then what then of the blind, what tongue-sound etched upon the skull and lithe memorial imagery?

Later the words that began to bubble up spun themselves into banners of tightly taught thought. Going, adrift: a white cotton scarf set wide over the escarpment of the land and a gull at glide upward to snatch it and then is gone and I stare wide-eyed and frightened and loose myself in the sounding of the salt-damp ocean air, frenzied and a twirl.

Gone.

VIII

Light awakens in a room. A small ache stirs—

A child’s tooth, drops

As does the land and the falls that make from ore and copper and body count.

The geological that whispers grief set toward the Ying-Yang sea and lanterns skyward

as you and I carve light from shadow.

Husk and cob of time peeled from skin and bone and

as we drift and countenance,

we draw circles out of incurable lines.

The mist rising, the island swelling and the ghosts seeping from the small corners of rain and cooked scent.

Beckoning from the tilt of grief and all that which harbingers relief.

Arise.

GHOSTS AND THE GOLDEN FALLS OF THE YING-YANG SEA

黃金瀑布

winter’s wounds

sewn together by tender roses

exhausted fingers

almost touching the stars that skim the water

the storm fills my sleeves

like grieving mercury distant happiness

like a sharp knife slicing at my heels

—Wang Yin 王寅

Prelude: Enter

I

The Oxen rid of their sun ranging in the shade of the trees, the hills, the dark and then a light brush,

a shadow before it has been forestalled, this swaying.

Calves, children, boys, brothers swaying in the sun.

II

The Sea has a hunger of its own just as the mountain

whose viridian body rusts from the gold that blooded

through the serpent falls

bone and clay and iron that drop like teeth from an old ghost's starved body,

mining the troubles over and inside you.

Remember when you stood and turned to the spread and fanning beneath,

the sea drinking up the white foam and spitting back the past with the iron

and the mountain's phosphorus hope.

It was then you became like a dragonfly set loose.

Later you closed your eyes amid the wind-snapping of cameras and tourists,

shivered and turned like softened bamboo

for you could not explain to the family and the strangers and the wind,

that your body belonged to the sway and cascade.

Your heart part of the tongue-lick and brine of the double syllable'd waters below.

So you climbed until your sight matched the earth's fickle desire.

In that moment of shutter snapping and world whirling you opened.

And you leapt.

Is it possible that I remember for you?

You stood like a pole at the opening of the mountain's mouth

the roared water and rancid rust and the vegetative mist,

the scars and undulations tatooing the plates that shifted from miners and geology,

its appearance all root and knot and woody hair,

cascade as dreadlocks, twists like Monokoke

and all pulled out of its sleep by the sea's hunger.

The land does not sleep and the ghosts do not feed but there they are:

the scars that lay like an alphabet long before the miners from Japan came

to sword it open and scavenger it up.

But you remained for love.

Later, before the car doors shut like an old barn, you stood

as if you too were of the dead and streaming

and reached for my hand and spoke:

"Tourists come for romance and to chalk off the boredom of their days

but I came to make peace with the lovers who fought over me before you."

Tooth and tongue and tick:

You made it so.

That night you lanterned along the alleys of 九份

in search of dumplings and red silk and Mahjong partners.

Each stone like the first syllable in a child's vocabulary

the beat of poppled tea, eyes like candled calligraphy against a door.

Each sound was a tongue slipped into a mouth

serpent or leaf dampened by the sea's spray.

In this nation, old women say that the land tells stories but that the sea withholds them.

What then to make of this island home of stories and sellers and withholders

the strollers and the statues and the steadied loss marking us?

III

And the years slip like breath along the edges of our skin, an abundance and a reckoning, the firmament spreads wide, like a gap-toothed space, dark and unending. Pitch and Pale above, all that which twined and coursed through you, comes forth like small accumulations.

And then.

IV

Words, like small billows under hull, tiller the jib of my meandering thoughts. Pictures, like wisps of exhalation, rudder the carriage of my body’s hinting. I have always worked both, rhyme and flap, to set my life’s navigation right—Ballast of Boom and Keel—the steerage from which I have tried to helm my way home. A halyard in its pulling.

It begins with the knotted sound of a bell rung in a temple, the clap of something indistinguishable that takes flight, the flutter of a golden silk robe, the tap of a market cart’s wobbly-kneed wheel, the bark scattered in the distance, the inviolate movement of an old woman’s hands across the ravine of a green fruit, the bellow and the bought bough, gone-gong, left out in the tropical rain for too long.

V

It began with the knotted sound of a bell rung wrong in a temple, the flutter of a golden silk robe and the line on an old woman’s hand who once spoke:

You will live as long as bird at sea.

VI

A firefly hums inside the hive of a red lantern

And the albion rushes inside the cove between our words

And the tectonic touches each of us in its gathering and swelling.

And am I simply dreaming all of this as I wait for you?

Your rusted mountain stream impregnates my stubborn, aquatic body.

The effluvium of our lives spit forth like ink upon rice paper

and the children who will not make it yet to this life haunt us.

And we remain, like the water fireworking from the mountain,

agape.

Red, rusted lantern

fingering over The Ying-Yang sea,

you to me,

燈籠

燈籠的海.

Set that to flame.

For all things disappear,

but in their washing remain and turn our loss into broken languages

bodied by the syntax of rain.

VII

We are pictures rendered.

Then what then of the blind, what tongue-sound etched upon the skull and lithe memorial imagery?

Later the words that began to bubble up spun themselves into banners of tightly taught thought. Going, adrift: a white cotton scarf set wide over the escarpment of the land and a gull at glide upward to snatch it and then is gone and I stare wide-eyed and frightened and loose myself in the sounding of the salt-damp ocean air, frenzied and a twirl.

Gone.

VIII

Light awakens in a room. A small ache stirs—

A child’s tooth, drops

As does the land and the falls that make from ore and copper and body count.

The geological that whispers grief set toward the Ying-Yang sea and lanterns skyward

as you and I carve light from shadow.

Husk and cob of time peeled from skin and bone and

as we drift and countenance,

we draw circles out of incurable lines.

The mist rising, the island swelling and the ghosts seeping from the small corners of rain and cooked scent.

Beckoning from the tilt of grief and all that which harbingers relief.

Arise.