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.
