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Neil Aitken
GHOST PASSPORT
When I wake to the city I once called home
and now return to, I wake stranger and son,
at once present and longing. Almost wordless
except for a name bestowed by a grandfather
over-fond of fortunes and women. I keep
a half dozen numbers, insufficient to count
even my finger tips, let alone my years.
Even my hand is distant, a cipher that defies
ready description. My body an unknown quantity,
a strange transcription of limbs. Till at last,
I am merely a ghost among the living, wandering
deep in the endless rising gray of buildings,
new and empty. Vacant. Lost among the streets
that fold into each other, like creases in the skin
where the arms bend, where the mouth opens wide
to take in food, the only ambassador I recall.
IN HSIN CHU
Stronger than gravity, the wind
is a constant gale, or so it seems
in late summer and early fall
when not only paper and leaves,
but streets signs rattle and strain
against hot air, and small children
in light weight clothes
almost ascend into the sky
like stars blown free
from the city's bright web of lights.
What is invisible makes itself
manifest in miracles, letters from home
disappear only to surface again
plastered against the chain link fence
two towns away. Rain moves horizontally
as if writing itself into the wind,
a palimpsest of salt and storm,
the coding of factories and sweat.
What messages it brings,
I cannot read or comprehend.
My shirts yellowed with sun and iron water,
their own unraveling codex of love
and loss, and the secret names
of post office faces I can't recall from graves.
But I lean into it anyway and bike slowly,
trying to travel in a straight line
as if I were light, or merely its memory,
passing through the dark.
THE ART OF FORGETTING
I have a talent for forgetting. I have forgotten
how to swim, how to ride a bike– even how to pronounce my own name
properly in Mandarin, each sound a hard and pitted salt plum I marry
to my teeth, but cannot break open. Forgetting is in the blood,
something I must have gained from my grandmother who hated my
grandfather enough to blank out the first two years of their
arranged marriage, including my mother's birth.
When I wake this morning to the gray Taipei sky
and dress in that early light that filters in somehow through a
hundred shades of smog, I remember that today marks a full year
since my arrival here in Taiwan. I am not my grandmother, I want to
remember this year and the one to come. They say that the muscles
have memory, that the body recalls any motion rehearsed over a
period of time. My body must be relearning Taiwan the hard way. I
feel it when I move, in the way my calves have hardened, in the scar
on my chest where where my muscles split when a truck door opened in
front of my bike, in the callouses on my knees where I have knelt
every morning on the cement and tile floors and offered a prayer for
someone to loosen my tongue, to unlock that rusted door.
AT THE END OF POETRY
First, the high brilliant sky in its perfect cold,
the snow laid down in drifts as thin
as flame, and the last taste of barbed wire
rusting on the post, almost gone.
From the memory of one thing
comes another, grief embodied
in a scarf whipped free by the wind,
the red-tailed hawk spun in the distant sun,
the smallest of satellites, the frozen earth
complete with tiny lakes of glass.
Here, almost invisible against the deafening fields,
the remains of a small boat sunk low
in the drained slough, forgotten
but for the crows and the few final reeds
that persist in its shade.
There are journeys we never take,
but fold back over again, clippings of fires,
wars, deaths, rebirths. At night, the coals
settle in the stove, the kettle steams.
Outside, always a man in a heavy coat
with a lantern in hand moving through the dark
toward the whitening ghosts of trees.
ALL THE NAMES OF CHILDREN
AND HOMES WE MAY NEVER KNOW
In her blue-skinned letter, folded in thirds,
she wants to know why the world unfolds
in a way that leaves us on opposite coasts
stuttering in inked pages and uncertain hope,
with the wide back of America between us.
And though she tells me of her brother
born again upstate, in this time for robbery,
and her father found, thought dead for years,
now living outside their old village by the Mekong
with a new wife and six kids – I want only to hold her
closer than this, to wonder at her anger and awe
that burns like a brand against the skin.
Give it time,
I want to whisper in the ear of the one I
might love.
Even the bamboo has forgotten the napalm at last.
Each arch of a word on the page is only a small temple,
or perhaps, at best, a makeshift boat of plank and reed
in an endless surge of ink. Held against the light,
I want to believe some trace of her fingers remains
caught between these lines. Something I can gather
like stones from a river, whatever love carries
in its small unyielding tides, the earth breaking wide
from the moon. The trees bent at the water's edge.
©
Neil Tangaroa Aitken 2007. |
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