Asiatic Dayflowers, day
flowered, I spent the morning
looking for an Asian Comma,
instead found
Quail Grass,
Plumed Cockscomb
by the side of the walkway,
looked like a heart exploding.
Red Spider Lilies flowered
in response to heavy rainfall,
mid-autumn, my running shoes
drying in the wetroom.
Plums had dropped from the trees,
splattered on the uneven stone,
bloody pulps I stepped over,
their sweetness in the air.
Doing laps of the courtyard at 1AM,
the sky here is never quite black,
more a grey through the haze,
lights in the occasional windows
silhouettes only half-imagined,
and there is a woman dancing
by the central chessboard,
traditional music from an old radio
her movements tranquil,
her shadow dancing also,
and I am walking through
the city at 2AM, the jungle
of tower blocks like my own,
the sky here an orange glow
as the streetlights seek escape,
phosphorescence, and I wonder
if my grandmother was known
to dance to the radio, and I
cannot remember her name
immediately, as if it has
danced away from me
in the years since she died
and as if I had not even tried
to keep it close, until 3AM,
dancing to slow songs by the lake.
i
This is the quietest place
I have ever wracked my bones
to shivers. Slivers of 6AM
sunlight over the lake
meant they could happily
break. That slow birth
of day, the warmth it brings
means I will wait for the streetlights
to expire and then I shall walk
until I am facing my ghost
from the opposite shore.
It will take me several years
and seven sunsets, steady pace.
ii
Five of a thousand islands
emerge from the mist
like turtle shells, slow reveal
and the soft caress of the water
against five shores much like
this one of a thousand, their rocks
not quite as blue as these rocks,
their blue as blue as something
equally blue. This is not
a place for simile, it is a place
for sitting and reading and breathing.
I do all three, and in doing so
I bring the other islands close.
Somebody smoked
here,
the dead butt on the rocky outcrop
with the view of Lingyin Temple,
its muddy gold
four hundred feet
below,
the same colour
as my copy of Pictures…
the gone world returned
in a certain shade of copper.
The eight-hundred steps
would have been harder for a person
nursing a bad habit.
I counted them
in Chinese
and doubled their length and the way
they tasted in my mouth. Rose to bile
I swallowed like pride sitting then
on the mountainside
with Lawrence we counted together
both untitled untethered.
At the four-hundredth step a couple picked seeds
and arranged them like good fortunes
making midday shadows small on the stone.
They heard
my breathing before they
saw me.
Greetings filled a vacuum entirely natural,
two birds
were quiet on approach and sang after the fact;
I heard them
from a mile away,
maybe more, responses
to the sound
of the stray cat
coming down.
Climbing the hill became an act
of self-definition, as if I rewrote myself
like rough translation on a steady incline,
made marks on trees to chart progress,
the other characters which scarred
bamboo stalks told tales of similar ascents.
The echo in the cavern at the midway point
ricocheted back along a decade.
I played ping pong sounds
With a chalk wall opposite.
I looked deep into the dark
and saw an outline of a man.
The climb to the temple shrine was justified
by the view over XiHu, sprawled beyond
and below the forest, the morning starting point
a speck to mark distance with rapid breaths.
You would not believe the lightness
of the air. You would not believe,
and I would not believe had I not
lost half a body along the way.
I tried to find words I could send
during a similarly quiet moment
when back amongst the concrete
jungle and found only one.
Strange, to raise a son
and then watch him leave, to rise
from the tarmac and then to climb the hill
and compose poems about leaving.
There are things I regret:
the belated birthday text;
the flight that split a holiday,
the way I raised my voice in the years before it fell away.
I stood upon the peak red faced
like Lingguan wang, knowing that
there was a right way and there was
a wrong way to seize the day.
I always needed time, rewind,
and if there are thirty-six heavens
then I start a two-person petition
to add the summer of 2007.
We climbed Langdale Pike
and from the top of the world
I closed my eyes and opened them
to a sublime sense of suspension.
Somebody caught me on the way down;
I recall that it was you.
I count the steps
and the caterpillars,
equal amounts of each,
the view from the top
justifies every history –
the trees through the mist
make the skyscrapers small
and I am smaller still.
The newest planks are dark wood
(three in a row suggests an accident),
you are careful with the other colours,
bent nails to our worn soles.
Empty bottle;
our only oversight.
I could walk this wooden road
for days, with its foliage parasols
grazing ankles, the electric hum
of insects occupying the canopy.
Murky waters;
our only complaint.
You press your palm to glass
when we descend to the underwater
gallery, and watch a swarm of fish
emerge from the darkness.
Their Latin names;
your only difficulty.
There is a concrete jungle out there
somewhere. There may or may not
be a concrete jungle out there
somewhere. There never has been.
We forget these things;
my English phone number.
Lunch on an abandoned railway platform,
we found detours disguised as shortcuts
and let the present become the past,
you marked it on the map as a footpath
with pen and arched back against an oak.
Packed sandwiches, my father would approve,
first lunch in a fortnight. We had told him
where we going, even though we were only
walking for the sake of walking,
following the trail into the trees
with nettle stings to raise on knees
you reserved a smile for every opposite direction.
From afar, we watched the birds partly obscured,
and I recalled the way my father had cursed
when the pheasant has emerged as a blur
of brown and blue coming down Winter Hill.
It had been a long fuckkkkkkkk which faded
to a high whistle, fully spooked that high
above sea level. The look of fear I share
when I cycle in the city during rush hour.
The three of us prefer walking, laughed
our way back towards familiar civilization.
You should know by now
that when I cannot sleep I walk,
and that when I can no longer walk I sleep,
counting calories as a form of counting sheep.
At dinner with your parents
I was quiet as a gas leak.
I forget what we ate.
I found a new path,
halfway down the hill which links
my neighborhood with that
I cannot afford to live in,
a dirt track leading off into the woods,
a series of small clearings between
canopy clusters, straight bark I sat against
straight-backed and missed you
all the more for the lack of comfort.
Detours, even if daytime
delights are slight compensation
for your absence. Echoes
of snapped twigs do not compare
to the cyclical click of caught wind,
just as a walking breeze does not
move me like I did when we hit
that hill at full velocity. I felt
alive every single time, and always
failed to see that path, so caught up
in speeding towards a parting,
standing on the pedals.
Craig Writes Things 