In memory of 唐彦文 (1932 – 1977)

 

Where to locate you in the interminable station?

Nowhere goes clean through the static of decades without hitting a nerve

Nowhere are you coterminous with the right coordinates, the red time stamp

Nowhere does the skin unbind along the longitude of the page

Steam of a childhood episode erodes your sense of sound

Grandmother hoisting the sticky infant on the hip while using the communal wash closet

Entire decade where the verb to want arrived posthumously

To relive is the snarl of description, worked over repeatedly in the mind

The girl vomits up pilfered blue gumballs and thin sugar paste

New hues wash into the scene, pop songs written in the first person

Unable to sharpen her eyes, she loses most sense of proportion and scale

The child commits to language and things calcify in separation

Nowhere does the color of your skin awaken into current

The city infected quickly, rash of glass and steel

Workers cropping up by the factory towns, waiting to be plucked

Hairs of every head in the family stirred by the tendons of the wind

A verb and its likeness collude to make time full of repetitions

One exam result becomes a way station, and then another

The rising appetite of youth rinses off in red

Heart failure and macular degeneration and something diagnosis can’t hang language on

Nowhere am I rubbing a filament of 1958 against 2020

Nowhere is there a visual shock, two years sparking an omitted detail

Somewhere a generation of faces melts onto the last generation’s

Somewhere we keep attaching to the boundless unknowable

Nowhere are you filling in the fovea of our eyes with calligraphy ink

Nowhere does the memory-image not quiver

Somewhere the shadow of your language catches on my ear

Somewhere the mouth spills with the solutes of memory, which congeal into something altogether different

Without provocation the subject dies twice. The first time,
in the murk of benign guessing: illness, poor health, medicinal
odors, an organ refusing the heed of a metronome. The
second, by her own hand, her eldest daughter jams this fact
into a sentence, and from there, an interminable release.

 

 

And so: distance is introduced, a bulb of epinephrine. Shifts
in the air pressure. A new verb eats through the pith of what-
came-before. Fugitive. Beyond all limits, where you reside.

 

:: Not the face, but translucent gray spots, as if the face has been drained through

:: Not the adhesion of hardship, but what gets seamed into desire

:: Not the closing down of an expression, but the fluidity of murky forms

:: Not the bitten edge of the border, but what walks through

:: Not the marks of language, but a springing into

Image © Rowan Heuvel

This poem is taken from The Rupture Tense: Poems by Jenny Xie, published by Graywolf Press in the US.