Michelle, Anywhichwaywards

The limelight is not in her nature;

at any contest, she is one being who makes no crowd of itself;

standing with her back to the front of other people’s stages, she looks further out into the picture, and then — after that — into that further-out;

she is the alien-word of heart in a world of seven billion mouths, running to honey but beyond all sweet;

only she bewares the false-middle and the false-end just as well as the false-start;

and her shrewder nudity of Earth attention (stronger, brighter, deeper) means:

an aliver saliva in the vital sense and wider — wondering — why?s.

Photograph: 香港西貢大浪灣大洲尖洲 The islands of Tai Chau and Tsim Chau in Tai Long Wang, Sai Kung, Hong Kong

Lovers, Dogs, Etc. (Cheung Shue Tan Village 樟樹灘鄉)

● If you’ve ever liked any of the poetry I’ve posted on this site, you have Hong Kong to thank. It was my first trip there in 1998 that really got me writing again after a bit of a lull. What do I remember about Cheung Shue Tan? There was an old woman who made wonderful scarecrows out of modern-looking dolls with very Western faces: well, they certainly scared me! And there was the crab that stayed up one night to greet me in the moonlight after another hard day at the office at nearby CUHK. It had one big, white-tipped claw that shone at me through the dark. And of course there was Mr Yeung’s sandalwood incense, burnt at dawn and dusk to appease the ancestors and, in the process, bringing a hint of true fragrance into my life . . .

Oh, and before I forget, there was the huge python that crossed the road as a file of us were making our down from the bus stop. You know that feeling: human beings standing very still, hardly daring to move, while waiting for danger to take our breath away.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Love walks the lovers down the hill with practised elegance until —
aaai! it looks like an insect got her right in the eye
(they’ve got me too this way and no doubt you as well . . .).
There’s, she’s fixed. They walk off again down the asphalt road,
the dark patch there banana trees actually by daylight
still busy with small fruit this time of year (autumn).
I say hello to “my” dogs like signposts along the way:
the timid one that lies in front of careless traffic —
canine death-wish (I think to myself) — home-life must be bad,
and the wicky black one with the black tongue to match
his friendly bad manners.
I’m always moved by the endurance of these creatures, their doggedness
(sorry . . .),
patient through endless rounds of gates, locks and fences,
all the human words for NO! banging in dog-ears.
(Oh, the lovers have just turned off. Why do I always
take my eyes off the lovers?)
Here’s the giant grape-fruit tree (the tree itself largish)
on the corner that smells of shit worse somehow after dark.
I say a few soothing words to the mutt in the Plexiglas kennel,
the one that gives me that gitouttahere growl every time
(I’d give me that growl too cooped up in such “space”)
and there looms home unlit on the first floor
above Mr Yeung’s flat with the two glaring door-gods
pasted squarely before me on his glass sliding-doors
to ward off evil.


Photograph: Tai Po Cheung Shue Tan Heung

Note: Obelisk’s Demise

IN MEMORY OF A GOLDFISH . . .

When you died a second time
and came back to life, I was worried you’d begun to make
a habit of it. You never did,
growing instead
easily to become the biggest fish in the pond
with a healthy curiosity for what lay beyond, overwater.
As a fully-grown giant,
you started fattening out sideways
and would orbit your sphere round and round the perimeter —
a trundling red planet
truly at home in your girth. I guessed
you were sick
when you took to planting yourself upside-down
in a clump of waterlilies,
poor, demented mermaid headstanding in ocean and waving her gauze
at some air-drowned mortal
like me: Farewell! Each day you waved
and each day, unfinned,
I’d wave you my dry human wave in return — Farewell! —
till existence inside you shrank to a speck
and you sank
through the wreck
of your own dead weight

completely out of my depth.

Wide Awake and Dead to the World (Volcanic Glass)

Prehistorically once flung from the mouth of a volcano,
then frozen by time
into this — dark glass.
It must have been a fragment, I thought at first,
of some antique rural bottle, but
then it dawned on me
that the only thing it could be
was a whole fragment unto itself,
an entire jigsaw puzzle
consisting of only exactly one piece.
Stupidly, I wanted it
to show me another world, or at least
something astonishing hidden in the seams of visual habit —
after all, ours is an era of a myriad of transparencies —
how we long to see through
past the gloss of the surface to voluptuous promise
o so expertly packaged within,
but my toy showed me nothing —
I might as well have been looking through a carrot for the moon —
I was merely blinding myself better in the name of vision.
My friend the carpenter
goes out each day precisely to hit the nail on the head
and to saw with his ruler
down to the nearest millimetre
planks of timber beyond all our wildest dreams.
Perhaps this explained my newfound deep thirst for murk,
for that which was never meant to excite the organs of sight,
for that jagged lens
which will make absolutely no spectacle of itself
under any circumstances: optical point-blank refusal
of all acts of seeing. Geologists, I know,
have a word for it, drenched in Latin. They pronounce
rather than say it:
O-B-S-I-D-I-A-N.

Photograph: 香港東坪洲 Tung Ping Chau, Hong Kong

Afterliving (Simon. And Merlin. And Me)

Now I can only know you at all from the depth of the grief
of your dog. Loss is not something
we can ever run simply away from
with the speed ⸺ full pelt ⸺ of our legs,
yet what is a dog ⸺ newly orphaned ⸺ to do
but try. And try. And try. Otherwise,
stranded where standstill is the only possible option,
pain is forever,
never stopping to catch its breath.
From my long remote view, I think you could say
any of us would be proud of a mourning
that ran ⸺
and starved ⸺ for days,
single-mindedly careless of trivial well-being.
In this we sense the magic of both the dead and the living,
calling back and forth in synonymous,
mimicking hello’s
which evoke in the process an enigmatic Third Realm,
a world inhabited by life, and by death,
and by a finely indistinctive common-nonsensical Something Else ⸺
Other-Brother-Sister ⸺
that comes to the fore in peak-moments like this
just to teach us the gist
of page one of its elementary Beginner’s First Grammar
or the opening lines of some life-and-deathless short poem.

 

Photograph: 香港東涌黃龍坑豎井 Vertical shaft in Wong Lung Hang, Tung Chung, Hong Kong (2016)

“In June, it’s raining last year’s rain” by Woo Sai Nga, translated by Audrey Heijns

The rain beats down, cultivating flowers that can fly
while waiting for the rain to stop, people look around
their pupils filled with pools of water,
they let themselves waver
more easily by the rain

The umbrellas are in dire straits, hems are about to fly
Tree trunks that got soaked appear deeper
and tougher than human beings

The sun sets, the sun rises
and it still keeps on
raining

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

〈六月，天空下著去年的雨〉／ 胡世雅

雨擊落，種出會飛的花
等雨停的人東張西望
把水窪都納進眼瞳
讓自己更容易
被雨動搖

傘很狼狽，衣擺欲飛
被淋濕的樹幹比起人
擁有更深沉堅硬的神色

日落下去，日升上來
而雨
還在下

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

● Woo Sai Nga, born in Hong Kong, is a member of Fannou Poetry Society. She graduated from the Chinese Department, Baptist University of Hong Kong in 2017 and is now teaching at a secondary school. She publishes poems in literary magazines in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and has won the Youth Literary Award (青年文學獎) and the Award for Creative Writing in Chinese (中文文學創作獎) in Hong Kong. She was the leader of the workshop “Literary Convergence ⸺ May Fourth Hong Kong”, Theatre-in-Education Project (Reading and Writing), held at the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019/20.

● Audrey Heijns, based in Hong Kong, is working at Shenzhen University. Her translations of Chinese literature have been published in literary magazines, including Het Trage Vuur, Twee Ronde, KortVerhaal, Terras, Renditions, Exchanges and Poetry International.

Eagles (Ling Kok Shan 菱角山)

They are so much wing
the body is merely a regal hinge
equipped with claws.

In their circles they soar
the stillness of a pin-drop
and lift the earthbound
a just fraction off Earth.

(A mountain of granite below
is made light of
and the sea all the way
to the horizon
seems small.)

Above white tombs
built into the steep hill-side
their voices break the science of the shade.

Hearing Voices

A voice calls your name
three, four times through the (empty)
house. It’s her voice,
you’re sure — the voice

of your sister. You expect
any moment to see
her face worrying
at a window or opening
to you through a door.

There is no one.

You explain it as a sign
of an “audible disorder”
in your head, but maybe
this key to all of us
that has no precise sound
or shape of its own
borrowed one refrain
from insistent thought
to ask you to step outside
your own self-echo.

 

Photograph: 香港西貢：塗鴉 Graffiti seen in Sai Kung, Hong Kong (2018)

Mowdown

Ալ հոգնա՜ծ եմ
ըսպասելեն տենչանքներուս մեղրին անույշ
— Միսաք Մեծարենց

I imagined you uncomfortably centre of a swarm
when you said you’d run them over with the mower,
the bees. We marched to our surprise
back to the place, hearing the high-voltage hum
of an unidentified engine, singing of the sting
rather than of coarse honey’s vaguer promise.
Clustered at the mouth of a depression,
they made a house of themselves on shorn grass,
court of a runaway queen restless for fresh pollen
or victims of virus-longing.
Sentries levitated against our curious air-space,
buzzing sun-glassed heads as a check to distance.
My exposed ankles felt for the insects,
with the sun in the west and frogs exhaling damp at dusk
to the threat of frosts. What could they do
deprived of the six angles of the hexagon
bees need to impose minimum shelter on their world?
To know that we would have to return
when fields of frozen-grinning daisies next came back to light.
And we did. They were gone.

Photograph: 香港錦田天后廟 Tin Hau Temple in Kam Tin, Hong Kong (2016)

The Use of One’s Legs (Sha Tin 沙田)

 

At least partially paralyzed below the waist,
he is bemused — or cross — in the whole of his face
when baldly I tell him in the best of my bad Cantonese
that I have no interest in tennis at all,
no: mou hingcheui 冇興趣.
“God, what a waste!” I imagine I see him think.
How he wishes he could force my legs
through some quirk or kink
of fate at once to trade places with his!
For solace he lights up a cigarette,
smoking hot air the length of Lek Yuen Street.
When he’s finished lunch we shake able-bodied arms
before he grips calloused wheels with his sugar-cube-crushing palms
and rolls off to a court nearby for a set.
Unsteady as sunstroke as I get to my feet,
I have to duck a dragonfly-volley aimed slap bang right between the eyes,
like guilt.

 

Photograph: 香港坪洲廟仔 Small shrine on Peng Chau, Hong Kong