Canto 1: Ghost Composer

         this unseen structure    written by a ghost
 
sets up a red auditorium
 
the little mouth in the womb sipping at scarlet sludge
 
maggot-like fingers    arching to grab at mother
 
grabbing red-hot sheet music
 
the cello spattered with pearl-white mucus
 
has been abruptly bowed    the fœtus hangs on that notation

 

         listen    to the submerged structure at its inception

 

the foetus is the notation    a pearl of rancid perfume
 
its still undifferentiated limbs already nailed down
 
a moment ago squirming in the egg    it has shaken the bell’s ring apart
 
the music vomits branches saturated in sky-blue greasepaint

 

close your eyes and hear birdsong string up a dotted line
 
green leaves    tongues licking into the old age of bowstrings
 
twisting wrinkled flowers stockpiled by ghosts
 
like a dried scallop the cello echoes the ocean’s vast enormity
 
pouring out emptiness once, pouring out the sobs a thousand times in flashback
 
close your eyes    semen dissolves the dark
 
         in the net’s tail, the silvery shoals
 
flesh still flowing in the little ears    flowing into thought
 
the little ghost calm in wordless song, the world calm in lingering
 
inside blood-red elements

 

this is May    the wind is full of weeping
 
an empty wooden chair before the classroom altar
 
turns around    waits for him to arrive

 

First Day

snow on the mountains    melting in sunlight
 
just slipped out of a tunnel too
 
this little beast    sleeps on its side

 

a weeping frenzy
 
fills in the hollows on the bolster
 
mycelium-fine hair damp and briny

 

paws shrunk in a coverlet of white mittens    tremble faintly
 
a tsunami picks up the sailor’s little    cot

 

another hostage mortgaged to home and family
 
snow on the mountains    parallel to the masthead watchers
 
he is added to endless weary human forms
 
returning    implies kissing the next ocean breakers

 

a photo stops the verdant pine wood outside the window
 
the instant daybreak hits the shutter
 
he falls in love with the dream in a dream that he isn’t there

 

shattered on a soft reef    to have reached
 
ignorance of black    ignorance of white
 
a bitter rosin    fierce friction on tree-trunks remembered

 

Tenth Day

in the market snow’s brightness slaps your face    too well-known
 
as the car’s automatic door lock snicks softly shut
 
his eyes are still firmly closed thirty years on

 

the keen chill whets life    the sheaves of light
 
golden    milky-tasting    far from symbolic
 
by a nurse’s hand at the bedside held tight

 

the seal’s little nostrils rise from the whitecap coverlet
 
geranium and lemon    a seductive solution thirty years on
 
though there’s doubt then    with sewn-up eyelids’ hurt

 

sewing the tenth-day world onto what’s external
 
light’s tenth pull on the trigger already an axiom
 
he’s shot    chasing the rifling of the barrel

 

whose nature lengthens unto death    avalanche sky-fallen
 
both feet pillowed on melt-water’s line of thought
   at the command of a geography milky-tasting and golden

 

double exposure in the mind    leaps the car door and lands on
 
suddenly-wakened acrid pellets of fruit-flesh
 
hidden by light-speed among blind cobbles he blazes on

 

Mother’s Handwriting

her hand gently strokes    after death still stroking
 
each white deep-sea coral branch
 
refracted through layer on layer of blue roiling

 

cold as carefully-chosen words    the first letter written to her son
 
in her own hand    the seawater scours with its murmuring
 
through images of a little face currents are glancing

 

   with her scribbles    page by page growing
 
a drop of blood called love    from the start
 
each day into stickier grammar ripening

 

   only against the tide of time can the son’s reply be delivered
 
the son’s gaze changes the direction of reading
 
reads up to    illness when he can’t hold a word for shivering

 

   her cut-off hands    above the page her ocean hanging
 
a single inch away    the blue ink still more dazzling
 
body heat curdles into a place the wind can’t blow down

 

coral lamp    sets off a blood-woven twilight
 
faintly lighting the moment of a poem in childbirth
 
as all language responds to dying words clogged in a heart

 

First Month Fulfilled

into the round lip of the First Moon’s cup will pour
 
so many moons    now the child is lying quiet underwater
 
becoming part of the far-off view of early morning

 

waking early    little frog or swordfish
 
opening the webs between its five fingers    pupils gleam and wander to
 
the window    the aquarium’s bright beautiful glass

 

First Month clouds    belly’s fish-scales shimmering bright
 
the first Spring bends down and gives his cheeks a scratchy kiss
 
birdsong’s colourful tail dragging the little cot along

 

still doesn’t know the past exists    doesn’t know the bloody circulation
 
plucking at his eyelashes    an non-person’s daybreak
each cell a boat wandering off its course

 

delivering the single passion of being dashed on the rocks
 
this child’s good behaviour    has exhausted the reticence of the future
 
uprooting    the clock’s second hand in brilliant sunshine

 

he has understood that the bitterest of tears must remain unspoken
 
little dolphin in swaddling clothes, one year old in one day
 
eyes full of amazement    gently splashing into the whirlpool

 

Fifty Days

the ocean is like mother’s body detained elsewhere
 
the only hand she has left    cut off in the photo
 
on her nightdress ripples of blue and green stripes

 

sleeves rolled all the way up    a mild and kindly light
 
embracing  him    a seashore overflowing with the scent of soap
 
telling him that all his life he’ll rest his head on the sea-breeze’s shoulder

 

all his life sopping wet looking up from the washbasin
 
at the tiny nakedness clambering up the wrapped-up umbilical cord
 
a tiny stalk    with the evanescent dialect of the water’s voice

 

chatting with mother    her non-existence
 
has cut off    bleached    when injected into her son
 
brightly beautiful as the tracks of terns everywhere

 

even the sea will die too    just as words
 
have died    then scoop him up    skin sticky with dream journeys
 
an exercise lost in the washbasin

 

pulling at a hand embedded in a tiny armpit
 
that hand becomes ocean is also known    in a son’s body weight
 
lying down in mother’s fragments    he    endures this pleasure

 

Seventy Days - May 4th

the wild ducks have tucked lapis lazuli feathers in their bosoms
 
voyaging on the little lake of his snow-white lapel
 
bent into the eyebrows of an instant    spilling out laughter

 

migrant birds are seduced by the magnet planted in their brain
 
flight!    the meaning that lies between two dates
 
burns both hands    makes the writing’s shape more graceful

 

grown into a cobblestone full of life in the little square
 
jolting the pram    and the curious sun leaning over it
 
snowy mountains like smoke curling up from a cigarette

 

a farewell to being full of life    bamboo grove drawing out the scent of rain
 
blotting out a million miles    he reflects the claustrophobia of the water’s sound
 
first moment forged into ineluctable madness

 

the ducks’ emerald necks loll on their backs
 
seashore’s axis twisted through 360 degrees
 
sewn soft toys of his youth    only the needle’s eye is left

 

his today so like a fake    mollusk clouds
 
have endlessly climbed the ridgeportents of living
 
quack    quack    ducks’ orange tongues are still explaining

 

Peking Opera Lesson

peonies cluster round    on their fine stamens stand pergola and patio
 
her cheek transits over to him    a dream half-white half-red
 
his sweet tenderness becomes her springtime soprano
 
is’t man? is’t ghost?    an impossible beauty dallies with the world beyond
 
dalliance  approaching    powder’s perfume shores up the aroma of flesh
 
hip-swinging    high buskins    wade the riffling pool till it overflows
 
he sings    and she signs each drawn-out end-rhyme
 
life is like theatre    but not  everyone puts on a brilliant show
—says Father

 

Eastern Peace Market    Fortuna Theatre    Goldfish Lane
 
all chasing the king’s concubine    clouds want clothes flowers want faces
 
history wants broken-down relics that follow after greasepaint is gone
 
he and she    amorous looks and sweet ogling fill in a blank storyline
 
white silk sleeves have been rippling for a millennium    who cares about dried-up names?
 
the shot glass is filled up all unseen    is knocked back all unseen
 
the snapped neck hangs from the strap in a darkened private party
 
pirouettes    a true cut flower encountered this false coming of age
—says Father

 

a world hidden in air    materializes
 
with the crane’s cries    oh dynasties    the crimson and the white are bliss indeed
 
an aria forced from deep in the throat    forces out Deep Time’s metamorphoses
 
always the same story    always this girl and this boy
 
treading the margin of the stage as if it were the margin of time
 
treading the knife-edge of the now    oceans below the cliff recede
 
she and he watch us from a great height    only extreme elegance is allowed
 
oh how golden shines art’s alembic    it fills every silence in the ear
—says Father