power, I make out the tin
shacks, the stalls selling juices,
the red-tiled colonial
barracks, the new mall.
It is raining profusely.
After years of her urging
me to go, me holding back,
I have no more excuses.
State-Building
Break a vase, says Derek Walcott, and the love
that reassembles the fragments will be stronger than
that love which took its symmetry for granted.
When I read this, I can only think who broke it?
In the British Museum, two black ‘figures’
(they don’t say slaves) beat olives from a tree;
a ‘naked youth’ stoops to gather the fallen
fruit. The freeborn men elsewhere, safe behind
their porticos, argue about the world’s
true form, or talk of bee glue, used
to seal the hive against attack, later called
propolis, meaning that it has to come
before – is crucial for – the building of a state.
*
Here it’s summer and bees groan inside
the carcass of a split bin bag. A figure passes,
is close to passed, when I see her face, half
shadow, marked with sweat or tears, the folds
beneath each downcast eye the same light
brown as – oceans off – my grandma. Mak.
Give me a love that’s unassimilated, sharp
as broken pots. That can’t be taken; granted.
My dad would work among the blue and white
pieces of a Ming vase – his job to get it
passable. He’d gather every bit and after days
assembling, filling in (putty, spit, glue),
draw forth – not sweetness – something new.
Lines of Flight
Mariinsky Canal
A girl twists a stalk of rye
around her wrist like
a bracelet. She sees her father
at the plough and wants
to pick a cornflower, its dark
blue almost purple
colour threaded through
with grief, among the weeds.
She wants to go and pin
one to his chest. And all this
is implied, though
the photograph itself
shows just a field of rye
with cornflowers.
Diyarbakır
One day, a white rabbit read
my fortune, twitching as it chose
from several slips of paper, soft head
straining at its harness, nose
scabbed, peeled back like bark.
Here, amid the desert, stark
as day, they tortured dissidents;
now paper slips blow between
the points of a barbed wire fence.
A life should not just be, but mean.
Illinois
The familiar, unearthly
scent of Bayside Breeze.
On the freeway, bent
along its axis, I do
as ghosts do: wait.
Acres of still corn.
Slow-smelling night.
Across the ocean
he lies in hospital.
He might as well be
dead. This far from
the side of any bay,
I measure sweetness
by its incongruity.
London
A shuttle flies between
the seasons, smoothest
from spring to summer
when I think of my Chinese
forebears forced to work
a loom. Who’d be alone
today? Migratory birds are
weaving new patterns
in the air, shuttles flying
back and forth. Here. No,
there. I’ve been missing you.
My Name Is Dai
I heard him say his name was die, and seconds later that it was short for
David, spelt D-A-I. We had just sat down when he walked up to me
and Susie. He said he recognized her from the National Portrait Gallery.
The one with the large forehead above the door. People miss it. The sad
smile. Beer sloshed against the edges of his glass like a fish trying to
escape its bowl, but in this case the fish was dead and only looked to be
alive because of Dai’s swaying. There are people who relieve themselves
of information like a dog pissing against a streetlamp to mark out
territory, urination no longer in the service of the body, providing no
relief. Likewise, conversation. Dai was a type of Ancient Mariner.
It was in his bones. He’d been working on a site with Polish builders
and it was one of their birthdays. He mimed plunking bottles on the table.
Vodka. Whole bottles? I’m Welsh, he said. I was born on a mountain.
Between two sheepdogs. He started talking about the village he grew up
in, how happy he was among the meadows and milking cows, how
unhappy he was at school. You might’ve heard of one boy from school.
A right goody. Spoke like Audrey Hepburn or Shakespeare. We all bullied
him, but my mam would say why don’t you be like Michael, why don’t you
be like Michael. Michael bloody Sheen. Michael’s shirts were always