(From Track Works, 2017)
Timescape: Midnight Express
Walk gingerly, little lotus
down that dim tenement hallway,
lean on my imagination
for support. For the record
I heard tell you were seven
when they broke your
stride, bones bent
and freshly encased
in yellow satin shoes
embroidered with red
and blue silk, the right
a peony, the left,
chrysanthemum,
delicate rooted things
that fall to pieces
in a storm.
You told me once
that you were a bride
shy of your eighteenth
birthday, so I contrived
a tableau in which
you sat on the edge
of a lacquered
canopy bed draped
by silk gauze sewn
with the standard
dragon and phoenix
frolicking, flying
with random abandon
in a piece of heavenly
eternity/ immortality
aggressive metaphor
for orgasmic high
the secret message
of ecstasy in flight,
kinetic eroticism
squeezed between
wings and tails,
stitched to resemble
the rush of pleasure’s
pinnacle, the dying in
that little moment.
But for you, little lotus
time was earthbound and
still, wasn’t it?
In the long dark hall
on the other side
of the world far
from your people,
without satin, without red,
an abrupt world reduced
to a sphere spinning out
of step. And while
women upstairs
squealed along
to Cantonese operas
louder than the clacking
of their Mahjong tiles,
your once prestigious
deformity became
a shame and you
became an absence
behind a closed
and silent door,
where I saw you
waiting by the light
of a rising moon
for the groom
to lift the veil
give fleet to the wings
of the mythical beasts.
Here, little lotus,
is the room I made up
just for you, where
if you must fall, fall
into my story of you
by a rosewood desk
inlaid with mother
of pearl, covered
with a woven runner of
peacocks minutely stitched
in gold veined threads
of Titian blue
before joining
my galaxy of captives
who’ve had the soles
of their feet pummeled,
de-skinned, their meta-
tarsals cracked,
ambulation neutered.
In my chronicle
you are among your
kind, a ring of
prisoners, pilgrims
orbiting world’s
history counterclock-
wise in dirty linen,
rusty shackles cutting
short their steps,
some even crawling
on hands and knees,
but you won’t need
the irons, little lotus,
your gait already
abridged, infections
have come and gone,
you’ve been rendered
immune, your sway,
your tilt toward
a faint idea
of eggshells,
of inebriation
around the pole
comes naturally
now, like willow
like wind, like you
can fall any second
and call up the tender
infatuation in us
all, who are dreaming
the same dream
in the perpetual
night, roped together
under the single
shaft of light
from a crack
in the ceiling
where the dust
particles leap,
dance against
our paralysis
our time on earth.
FAMILY THERAPY
It all started, I’m sure, with
the sacrifice in Aulis, after
all that booty, all those girls,
in the end, divided,
the House of Atreus
falls. Then, after
the last body drops,
the walls crumble, awashed
in blood, just like that weird
Cassandra said. Elecktra fesses up,
dragging her favorite cleaver
dripping across the halls ...
(sylvan beds lost forever)
torn clumps of tapestry, faded beyond
touch lie outside the light
unwished on, bound by the laws
of the artist, the goddess rapacious
for some excitement, recorded on the blade’s
edge, points to her children with it
and curses them all until
not a single one is saved
and this we feast on every night
blighted by cruelty, the wrong
kinds of love, tongues shredded by insults
And all this time, the gristle, tissues
and organs and nerves
and corpuscles rotted with rage
membranes stuck in our teeth
lodged in our esophagus, too much
to tell, recount, redress. The blood flashes day and night
in our sleep like neon
and none of us can let it go.