The Black Anchors & To the South: Poems

Leaving his office on Daoqian Street

at noon, he sprints.

It is early spring, 1979.

The chill wind still stings.

Head down, he swings the clutched newspaper roll

in his hand violently from time to time.

Without realizing it, he walks to the South Gate Pier.

On the People’s Bridge, he looks out into the distance.

In the rust-colored dockyard, he sees

workers in rubber boots unloading.

Empty oil barrels roll in all directions

on the springboard like drunkards.

He frowns, bewildered,

feeling a wailing voice inside,

unable to get it out.

With a hoarse whistle, a ship that carries sand

slowly comes close, ready to be taken into the waves.

Standing there for a long time, just like that,

he suddenly shivers, shedding a tear.

After dark, he goes home,

a Soviet-style panel building,

a corridor blackened by beehive briquettes,

smell of diapers and boric acid soaps,

snuffles of a hunting hound.

By the window, Grandfather, recovering from a stroke,

pats the wicker chair and babbles something at him.

He shakes his head, props up the small dining table,

and spreads the newspaper.

Twenty years, a long shiver.

On behalf of his family, he once donated the dividends

from government policies to an elementary school.

In the blurry photo of the news item,

his frown is no different than on any other day.

But that evening, a beam of light falls

on his dim forehead. Premature lines,

like dark folds of fate,

are finally ruffled by ships leaving the dock,

and then comes the calm.

Before going to bed, he presses the news clippings

under the glass sheet on the chest of drawers

next to the family portrait flaking at the edges,

as if putting little anchors into turbulent night waves.

Silently, he places his body on the coir bed, sensing

a ticking clock inside winding down.

1.

The boiled water cools in the travel mug.

A buzzing fly crawls on a peeled honey pomelo.

The train slows down. She smooths out the blanket

and then rests her white hair laced with soot

on his shoulder. Oh, how impossible! Too frivolous.

No mirror would approve of this outlandish intimacy.

In the dappled photo album, they sit upright

until forced smiles freeze around parched mouths.

Yep, yep. I see him dryly nodding his head and going

on with the paper. Her serge coat with frayed elbows

is buttoned up to the neck. The small station, desolate,

is shrouded in gleaming twilight. A few chickens

forage on the damp railway tracks, occasionally fluttering

their wings. In the distance, the dyed mountains remain

monotonous like a country school’s blackboard with peeling

paint. She coughs quietly, peeking out the window—

A crowd of muddy children run by, baskets of goods

on their heads, tanned thin legs stirring up a cloud of dust.

Oh, not interested. But saliva and scruples bob up:

Here, the people are so poor and the fruits so sweet…

He pushes his reading glasses to his forehead

and shoos the flies with the paper, pretending not to notice

his neighbor’s sweaty bare feet dangling by his legs.

She turns around and sees him fishing out two coins

to press, at ease, the stubble on his cheeks.

Gaunt and old, now he is a stranger, whom destiny returns

to her—The wagon suddenly hits a bump.

2.

The train rocks gently through the endless dusk.

The gnats after the rain drive the entrance

of a small hotel into chaos. She rubs her knees,

sitting emptily among her luggage,

like squatting once in a terminal full of chicken shit

and missing the ferry for a holiday family visit.

Oh, there were the occasional dysentery-like bouts

of petit-bourgeois nostalgia, the compost, the globe,

and frosty gravity walls for Agriculture Fundamentals.

As rain dripped from the leaking roof

on the broken harmonica, she trimmed the wick

of the oil lamp and clumsily knitted a sweater.

She escaped in the eighth month of her pregnancy,

climbed into a boxcar, unwrapped her bandana

and curled up in the aisle. Another small station

slides behind, and the shadow of the mango trees

softens her complexion. “Sadly, I wouldn’t

be able to become Madame Curie

because I was too enamored of embroidery…”

The wheels rub out sparks on the rusty tracks.

Her honeymoon was made up of stations

and mourning gowns. The small round mirror

on the nightstand, cracked into four pieces,

pieced together a gloomy family portrait. The moon

hung high, like an extinguished crucible, or the cold

stare of Grandfather in the black frame, who had drowned

himself. On that hot evening, it was not some Nadja

with her curly braids, who stumbled into the garden,

but the eldest daughter in grief, who wore white flowers

and came to bid farewell to the young party member.

Oh, don’t be ridiculous! For the first time,

her proud neck bent toward him, like an arc

of a sounding rocket on parchment paper.

The colors of the mandarin ducks she embroidered

on the pillowcase faded, turning them to brown shelducks.

Like a leech, the gel pen she used for writing letters sucked

desperately, until the vast expanse, like an open umbrella,

suddenly closed in. After she cut off her braids and shredded

her dress into a diaper, I saw her running from the back

of the house and waving a kitchen knife in exasperation.

“Geez! I cannot even kill a chicken properly.” And the chicken

hopped back to the wet bed corner with dripping blood.

Thirty years were gone. She still stood there,

staring at a yielding light by her feet, her eyes fierce

and reticent like a thimble worn out.

The wind blew its last gust and scattered a stack

of lecture notes, whose corners were left with dents and rust

from the paper clips. She did not bother to pick them up.

With her elbows raised, she’s hit with a migraine.

A palm tree appears from the dusk, wearing

a tattered conical hat, to brush the dirt on her legs.

3.

Oh, Vietnam. The narrow-gauge train roars and crawls

all the way into the jungle, like a Vietnam veteran

with a broken leg. A cumbersome camera in his hands,

he stands sullen before a colonial style station house.

In the viewfinder, an image of his youngster years

flashes all of a sudden— the spiky palm leaves

and his curvy moustache. When he slumped over

his workstation, fiddling with a hand-cranked calculator,

did he ever think about the trailing light of a rocket

that quickly dissipated into the thin atmosphere?

What happened to our generation of intellectuals…

At least, someone broke the sound barrier of the age.

But he fell from grace, gazing down the dislodged

oxygen mask, and went to work in an arms factory

as a fitter; and with calloused hands,

screwed bolts into his own brain. Finally,

the higher-ups relaxed their decrees, he was allowed

to return home with hard candies and a model jet.

Lonely, irritable, strict as a program booklet,

bitter and tedious as a ration coupon,

I saw him coming back from work, carrying a bicycle

like a target drone, hanging his tea mug

and faux leather briefcase on a hook behind the door.

His inexplicable rage sounded like a cicada,

and after the clamor, brought a deeper silence,

like the model jet under the glass top

on the upper shelf of a locked bookcase.

By the window, he sat without any movement

and listened to a twitter or two

from the garden at the blue hour.

It is almost dawn, and a rooster crows by the fence.

He finally falls asleep, his white hair thinning, and

the drool around his mouth drips into a shining pool.

4.

After a brief shower, the bay shimmers

in the window, bright as melted solder.

He flips the local paper he cannot read

with a loud flutter. On the news bulletin,

Obama sits on a street in Hanoi eating rice noodles.

These bland, tasteless noodles seem

as if they are rolled out of a paper shredder.

And she sniffles, as her hand reaches under the blanket

to quietly take hold of his. The farther away from home,

the closer their shoulders fall together.

I see a narrow-gauge train passing through rain and fog,

as if through the mystery of existence

that remains inaccessible: the maiden years

of her curled braids and his shaking loyalty.

How did they survive these repressing nights

on the scorching bed? How to

chart the arrow of youth off the bow

with aerodynamics or molecular chemistry?

When he stood in front of the thick

concrete walls of a test site or when she fetched water

by cracking thin ice on the river with a mallet

despite her vertigo, how did resentment

spread like ripples and disappear among waterweeds?

And her father, facedown, floated

soundlessly up there. The life that they had

and that they speed up to drive further forward

is nothing but a terrible choral rehearsal

or a dried-up ink bottle with lines of admonitions

on the bottom, short and snappy like slogans:

“Don’t ever touch politics!”

“Don’t take up the brutal work of literature!”

Oh, how do printed curtains of literature,

now shredded to pieces, console the heart?

Their disappointment in me is exactly like

that of my own in myself, the same fold cut off

of fate that is sewn and then sewn again.

I see them leaning against each other,

like a pair of old hinges just oiled,

the deeper their wrinkles, the more cheerful

their faces, talking and laughing, always

seated across from me. And the delayed train

accelerates nonstop. Now he continues to read

the paper with a sign of doubt or vigilance.

And her dentureless mouth slurps a mango

like a sob. The shifting light through the window

glitters in their eyes, a kind of love

that shows itself in motion, a quotidian bit

of abyss, which begs no understanding

but mends something patiently

on the tracks. With a tremor of the wagon,

the mountains drop violently—then rise again.