Keepsakes from China

Keepsakes from China

I. From Shaoxing City

In The Food Market

In the food mart the dusky frogs’ stomachs
Are slit open, surrendering ruby.
Their skins are waistcoats
Unzipped to plunder the glistening fob watches
And spilt moneybags of lungs, hearts and intestines.
Their arms and legs stretch into martyrdom
And culinary destiny. The table of crucifixions
Distances through metaphor my nausea.
Tropes can be cunning ways to capture things there
In a way that makes them not really here.

However, turtles still solemnly paddle
Into delicacies. For minutes chopped-off fish heads
Gulp on nothingness and twitch imaginary fins.
Here, people’s stomachs are vacuum bags
And mouths are nozzles. The human palate and gut
Are sailors of old, who recklessly voyaged
Into the unknown, uncertain if the world
Was round or flat. I pick tomatoes
And potatoes. Such offerings are still
Candles lit in this slaughterhouse cathedral.

Teaching Chinese Students English

Like monks who roll their prayer beads
Between fingers and thumbs,
We mull on each English phrase:
The meaning of ‘messenger pigeon’ only breaks cover
When the bird is chalked on the board
And the warble and wings
Are mimed with my mouth and arms.

English words were well-worn leather before I got to know
These teenagers. They were saddles and reins
On horses moulded until utterly forgotten
On countless ventures into life.
Now I stand amazed, touching
And weighing this heavy leather, so stiff and creaking,
And breathe in
Its sweat and tang for the first time.

Like mesmerised fishermen who stare
At the evening dragging muddy, creased sheets
Across the waters, we in the class are astonished
At the slowly piling up river of words.
Children again,
We want to lift up its covers,
Because someone is muttering something underneath.
Is it, What are we and where are we going?

The Myth

The canals have a mother’s whispers this dawn.
The fishermen’s boats and tackle are smudged
Onto the waterways’ secrets.
Filthy tears are wrung
From the washing women’s laundry.

Today my students are immersed in Mandarin chants.
The surface of the words are mystery to me,
But I slide
Into the lament and lullaby, a fragrance
That tugs me back to the waterways.

By noon the day has taxed the tendons in the willows
And magnolias that smoulder on her banks,
Their reflections setting fire to her rivers.
The sweating water faints,
And she collapses over
The boulders and walls.
She’s hung upside down,
Exhausted, stretching to the rocks beneath.
Her amber feet are trapped on the ledges
And her arms dangle whitely, searing the pools below.
All day she hangs and wants to die
But knows she can’t.

She wants to be an infant again. ‘Mother,’ she sobs,
‘Where are your murmurings? Where, as the sun fades
And cools on your breasts,
Are the softened flares in willows
And cherry blossoms, which mirror and quieten me?
Where are your lungs, which breathe out
The deeper silence and give me my night song?
The fishermen still pluck the embers of fish
From my body.
Oh, come hide your sleet in me.
Make me strong for the new day,
Ready for the boats and brimming with fish…’

Winter, nearing Spring

The willows give up being willows.
What’s left
Of their sinews blackens the canals and threads
Among the washing women. The rain is not rain
But a falling mist that eddies and softens the green
Beginnings in willows. Everything’s as bare
As the English I teach, and few of my words glisten
Clarity in the minds of my students.

The teenagers remain as barren as those branches
Inking the canals outside. I turn to slapstick
And mimicry to enthuse – and their laughter is not laughter,
But the sweet surprise in a gust of rain, here,
Then gone. A scent is left that lacks the burden
Memories often have.
It weightlessly shoves into the heart,
And the students’ faces become
More than faces. They open
Like hands that rub the cold off fingers and cheeks.

Rain, laughter, faces…
Words are memories,
Except for here, ambling by a river after I’ve taught,
Where washing women, boats and willows
Are reflections chiselled from the waters’ bronze,
Changing and blurring before these words can come.
Blessed am I in this moment, on this walk
Through a quietness housed only in itself.

II. Recollections

Memory of Fish

The men yank up nets of flickering scales and fins.
The flesh is sweetened on the coals. Chopsticks snatch
At the white shreds.
Salt dries on the men’s backs
While their mouths chew for decades on the tang of smoke and sea.

The boy collects fish in the canal:
Rainy slivers
That twist in his hands until they’re dropped into a bottle.
His mother calls. He carries on gathering. She calls again,
Her voice now piercing.
The fish in his hands fall
Shimmering to the ground.
They flutter and gag
On emptiness while he runs to her.

Fifty years later he wakes up sweating from dreams
Of fish and oceans. He reaches for his fishing rod,
And wonders – not for the first time –
What death really is.
Today on the sampan he watches a memory of fish
Which gleam on his fingers as they slide
Back into the sea or into the buckets.
He finds himself singing for his mother,
Dead now many years.
His cries try to soften the waters.

Memory of Leaves

Hundreds of feet down the path the leaves and bark
Finally muffle the clattering trishaws and the last
Of the straw hats and wheels bob out of view.

Here, half a world away from home, I halt,
Listening to my mother returning within,
Walking and nodding wisely
To conversations she can no longer hear.
Her hearing aid buzzes and clings to a world
That’s fobbed her off. The silence is no longer
Something to be cradled and nursed.
Beneath her shoes the leaves glimmer
With the memories of leaves crackled through,
Wintry drifts
Of serrations and veins splintering like parcels
Of tiny bones silently piled into graves.

Old Snow

I used to warm to the light in things,
Even to the way it gave ash to love.
Under my hand was her shoulder,
The other held her head.

Now things like that are still lives:
They are in this snow that has not swept down
This hard in decades, grubby as children’s hands
As in fistfuls they cling to trees, streets, faces.

Shanghai, Spring Festival, 2008

III. Ikons

From ‘Sky-Reaching Dead Tree’ Mountain

Once your branches played with the wind as you shivered
With leaves and blossoms. It took you hundreds of years
To realise the wind was tricking you.
She was slowly skinning off you the soft green radiance
Brought by the sap and roots. You tried to fight back,
But it was too late. Your bark withered to brittle coal.

I picture you unfolding over the centuries:
Your fat trunk a bonfire steadily snuffing out,
Its smoke twisting into branches and twigs
That pleaded with the stars and skies.
Nobody listened.
Birds flew from you as from the thud of thunder.

Today I found you.
I crouch and touch your bole,
Wanting to hear your stories.
I see the life-in-death of you –
Termites and beetles which slide through the wood
And give you your ash: charcoaled sawdust.
I sift through it among the bench-sized roots,
Wondering
What it is in me that sees the pleading in you.

Meditation, ‘Ancient Bell’ Park, Nanhui

The pond is a breath moistening a window:
The mind has bloomed its lotus on the shadows.
In a breeze the bushes of rose nudge awake the pond,
Their mirrored blossoms eyes opening,
Blinking in the sheen, irises of violet
And madder blurring under my hand
Scrawling in the pools.
The eddies circling out are the tolling of a bell,
Or fables of old,
Told to children again and again.
The pond stares at the tellings,
As if she has never heard them before.

Here meditation is a pebble
Gliding on water,
The mind and body riding in kayaks of breath.
I plunge a bucket under the moon
And she emerges dripping in the pail,
Her hands hiding her mouth,
Face round and white
As the flash of a koi’s belly.
My finger touches her surface,
Rippling open her lips.
She gapes at what she is.

From Buddhist Temples

Recall Cape Town: walks where tall flasks of pines
Sharpened the air with resin.
The trunks dwindled
Down the mountain slopes to where the hush and dazzle
Threw the grain of stone on shadows.
Their quiet burdens
Often made me contemplate you, when you were the Christ,
Pushing up a hill, the weight of the world on your back.

Here you are in the incense lit to ancestors
By children in temples. The fragrance is what
Took me back. Here monks chisel cackling faces
From dead branches that twist like flames:
Tiny Buddhas at one with Bodhi trees.
A shining reverence is smoothed out
Of the wood with rough cloths and resin.

What also took me back were these mountains,
Rearing like shaggy buffalo
And huge as consciousness itself.
But odours bang home first.
The children stoop and sway
In the scent to their forebears and take us
Back and forth into becoming us.
You at last
Become what you always were: ancestral fragrance.