Gunslinger

At this point in time
a finger on the trigger is the only fact you can possibly make headroom for
while your opponent ⸺
if there is such an assailant ⸺
manages to snaffle every hiding-place on offer
in this weather-boarded weather-beaten ghost-town.
TIME AT THIS POINT PASSES YOU BY:
needles on the cacti spike out an extra inch of their substance;
TIME AT THIS POINT PASSES YOU BY:
a whole small mountain
removes itself in equal measures of fine dust and sand
to relocate
in horse winds galloping the prairie or in long lung-linings
elastic with howl in a grey wolf;
TIME AT THIS POINT PASSES YOU BY:
you feel the rougher molecules
in particles, then atoms densely packed
in discrete motes of steel, as texture ⸺
out of thin air ⸺ overtakes by stealth
all those sources of distraction in your porous cowboy head.
You don’t exactly lose yourself
in this quest for concentration,
but, in blinding sunset’s molten yellow glare,
as your man-shadow lengthens past the point of no return
it is you who go off ⸺
not that figment of a firearm you once held in your hand
and when you turn for home
puzzling in this dark adaptation
and navigating by new stars in your personal undergalaxy,
there is no time to spare even one last thought
for any Wild Western smoking gun’s linger . . .

 

Photograph: 香港龍躍頭天后宮 Tin Hau Temple, Lung Yeuk Tau, Hong Kong

To the Man in the Bank (After Adam Zagajewski)

He turns to the woman behind him in the queue and says:
Life is like a bicycle ⸺ when you stop pedalling, it stops.
She disagrees, instinctively,
and so do I from further down the line (but
do I really, deep down?)
I think that
sometimes there is beauty that can take my breath away,
but mainly there’s just breath,
a slow and steady intake
of whatever’s taking place in time.
What he really meant to say was that our lives have become machine-like
and full of desperation, that work
is a rat-race destructive of any genuine sense of achievement
(but it could be so much more),
and that any thought of change is crushed by the constant threat of failure,
but by the time I managed to think of all this
it was too late to tell him ⸺
out loud.

 

Photograph: 香港東平洲 Tung Ping Chau, Hong Kong (2016)

Lightly, Politely, Indirectly

In the long run it seemed taller ⸺
failure ⸺
as if it were only “fortune” spelt backwards in a new word
too high for high school. Certainly,
it made dreams of all that was opposite richer;
without it, aspiration would have seemed uneventfully flatter.
And then, for the time being,
there was everything you could wish for in air,
in water,
in trees that still storeyed straight up out of the yard
into their skyward beams.
And the sun rose and settled, in one sense
out of this world,
yet infinitely at the same time
in it, with its warmth, its light,
its infallible solar-solidarity. And the moon too
more changeable than any sun could be
and so much closer to disaster in its proximity to darkness
continued to spin
with ritual total surrender to the dictates of gloom
through each slow stage of a broad blemished radiance.
The universe in its essential cycles
went on deliberately overriding ⸺
and undermining ⸺ Grand Human Design,
till finally for precisely that reason I decided to take my own life
back from AMBITION,
one day
dividing attention instead with everything transient, flawed,
and trustworthy only in the immediate sense,
in that unique scheme of a blink-of-the-eye instant
and, in the process, learning ⸺
if you could even call it “learning” ⸺
over and over ⸺ what so-called “damage” had to tell me⸺ the hard way.

 

Photograph: 香港沙田城門河 Shing Mun River, Sha Tin, Hong Kong (2017)

Conscientious Objector

Back-to-front was where you felt most at home,
it seemed. Maybe it had something to do
with being left-handed, and so right-minded.
But now it was time to turn your house-keeping off
and get carried away:
no matter how clean the dishes were, that
didn’t mean warmth when or where it counted,
spontaneous, heart-felt, operative.
A little dust, a little dirt, a little fraying at the edges
never seriously killed anyone, you see: they
were the death only of an outside, rigid image
applied quasi-religiously in the wrong place
like rule-books for breathing
or laughter.

 

Photograph: 香港大嶼山 Earth God Shrine, Lantau Island, Hong Kong

Her Knuckles Speak Her Mind

Kiki cracks her knuckle-joints.

From underneath the table, she punctuates my sly attempt at conversation with discreet bone-echo.

I never ask her outright what’s on her mind: her forehead — stretched taut by her black headscarf, by youthful-deluded insouciance —

frowns only at nothing,

at the shadow of a shadow of a doubt at once dispelled, I see,

by these syllables she utters in the ready skeleton of her hands.

 

Photograph: 香港茶果領 Cha Kwo Ling, Hong Kong (2018)

Counting to One

A steady lack of success may eventually thicken into something not in the least
like failure.

The small feel-toll of “empty” hours,
each one waiting for the wait to commence,
and the constant, constantly renewed frustration
of all and any expectation — this, too, is a quality
akin to achievement’s svelte felted unsung underlay.
In the long run,
the sum
of so many indefinite zeroes adds up —
not with addition’s conventional mathematics
by any stretch of the imagination but
by a stretch of the imagination beyond the reach
of all or any of the twenty-six letters in the English alphabet.
Crows likewise
learn to make music of their garbled black noise,
readjusting the settings of a marathon rasp
to accommodate the work night does before dawn
to the tune of a billion years
and then to the tune of another billion years
as evertheless they go on summoning from the sky
the flash of that one instant meteor-rite’s song.

Repairing the World

We need to be basically broken in ourselves
to be able to heal
whole
nearly everything else on this Earth.
Strange ⸺ that the deepest flaws call forth our doctoring touch!
Strange ⸺ that affinity
amounts to no more than fragilest finity
born of experience sore-raw.
Damage of course universally is a matter of course
and where we meet it
we greet it with unsuspected talents for repair, to mend
or assuage all that has come unwhole.
In this, we can’t always fail
and at least by diverting our fractured attention outwards
a span,
we may manage to outgrow despite ourselves in-growth,
and by knitting back the tissue where the tissue is undone
do for a lifetime of “strangers”
what by nature we cannot do here for ourselves.