Weaver - City of Eternal Spring

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PITT POETRY SERIES
Ed Ochester, Editor Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright 2014, Afaa Michael Weaver
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6325-7
ISBN 10: 0-8229-6325-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8030-8 (electronic) in
loving memory
Michael S. Weaver Jr.
19711972

I. Map of the Heart

What the Lotus Said

It will hurt when the knife is pulled away, pain no longer my walking staff and candle, mist taking over where doctors and medication once were the compromise with being born, stuck down in the algae of a coral reef, mind more than what settles into the brain, mind lost, mind found in the summer palace, walking along, following a man painting the sidewalk for tourists, each stroke born in a center between his ears, rippling out from his fingers, the knife gone, my eyes pulled back, opened the way angels tip open the speck of a body to pour in the soul, and my soul sat up, afraid to believe it had been let loose in a place so far from where it began, set loose to walk backward, follow the lines of thought to where a blossom lifts its head and thrives where flowers die.

Where We Are Born

Swallow, say the name of the place so softly our cheeks slip onto a creek's tongue where we sit and wonder how dumplings are made, the whisk of a hand tucking them into pockets like tiny purses with surprises for taste buds, or the joy of fingers tickling babies, babies the word for birds born to sit and wait in nests that sing brightly like matches clicking fires to live for a very short time, requiring mercy hanging in the air above them where worms fall from the mouths of mothers. Mother, come back from the dead and hold me now where skies speak the truth of orphans to say that you gave birth to me, how that sounds like mounds of money on fire, or a chorus of brown calves crying in fields of wet grass.

The Earthquakes in Taiwan

The life of the air melts, a film comes, a sleep covers our eyes, a god dismisses us the way black women shake the skies to mark an angry place until the gods in interiors of every speck of dust shake clouds so the tiniest thunderstones crack.

I split open this way, a world quaking from a split deep inside origins of hurt, my throat full, tongue stuck, choking on the sick lust of men, memories full of fractures, bent the wrong way until my life is undone inside me, forests swaying, mountaintops struggling to come back to being straight, as if straightness is what will save a mountain. The end has come, and it will come again to show us it has broad dominion over what we call God or Nature, a fusion of what lives inside the nerve that goes from what is pure joy to a fear of joy, the nerve that is the seat of the peace that proves itself to be a lie so that I want nothing, no one, no knowing except what I know is me, a man who melts, falls apart to be repaired in broken spaces.

A Chinese Theory of Strings

The cattle moo and make a muck under their hoofs just over the fence from where I walk in the mornings, down to my office over a mile away, and I have not seen the cattle but must believe all sound is evidence of life. The minor junctions in the crevices of what makes things real are spaces where I do not breathe, where I perch on my toes, suspended at the curb as motorcycles edge by, broken lines, snakes in Taipei's morning traffic. Here I can suspend myself in a falling apart, the innards of everything letting themselves become information's bits, the unbecoming, invisible nothings making me pure light or a jazz run with license to be mysteries or vapors.

In Shi Lin Night Market with My Lover

These are ribbons flapping around us, bright ribbons, every color, some that she has to tell me because I am blind to color at the worst times, buying socks or guessing what she is feeling when her face turns from pale yellow to disappointment, to fear, wound in the streams of fabric that give darkness light we count the windows that count us until there is nothing to see, and we sink down into the white napkins on the backs of the seats, the tiny televisions next to the driver.

In Shi Lin Night Market with My Lover

These are ribbons flapping around us, bright ribbons, every color, some that she has to tell me because I am blind to color at the worst times, buying socks or guessing what she is feeling when her face turns from pale yellow to disappointment, to fear, wound in the streams of fabric that give darkness light we count the windows that count us until there is nothing to see, and we sink down into the white napkins on the backs of the seats, the tiny televisions next to the driver.

I am Chinese in the mirror Chinese is an endless space in time where Chinese is what I cannot Be. In one window among the thousands I see the faces of the uncle who betrayed me, the done thing that made me a child inside a man, stuck in the claws of incest, in the one window, the way to a scream that jacks open my mouth but holds sound hostage, the dry tears of silence like veins cut open where no blood dares flow, this currency that paid for my tickets, led me in suspension to fly into the future and live here a day ahead of what happened to me when I was too young to know treason. I am Chinese in the mirror Chinese is an endless space in time I have come here to be what I cannot be.

At Drunken Moon Lake

In a white dress at midnight on Drunken Moon Lake, she tips around the edge of the pavilion where old men sit after morning Taiji, the sounds now the pluck of water from fish fighting the touching down the moon makes when it sleeps, and we come here to feed the fish so they will not eat the hero's body the man who loved China more than life, some full balance in the way winter is still summer in Taiwan, your hand whole notes but light against the way my cheeks fill. I ask where you put the dumplings we saved to honor what friends honor, lines that guard us against the agony of losing one another, all these years somehow painted in fire, a triptych people will erect in rumors, the last power in the island, the one that survives gas and electric.

---

bi yue xiu hua: hiding the moon, shaming the flowers; referring to incomparable female beauty

City of Eternal Spring

My mind rises up as the silos of interchanges, streams, passages of myself in floating layers so nothing can connect, and I dream emptiness on ships sailing to new places for new names, this ship my hands cupped in front of me, a beggar's bowl, a scooped out moon, a mouth opened to make noiseless screams, to arrange, to begin, to break through to stop my arrogance, believing what I touch, see, feel, hear, taste, make a case for being alive, so I can stop believing what happens when a caterpillar dreams itself beautiful.

---

bi yue xiu hua: hiding the moon, shaming the flowers; referring to incomparable female beauty

City of Eternal Spring

My mind rises up as the silos of interchanges, streams, passages of myself in floating layers so nothing can connect, and I dream emptiness on ships sailing to new places for new names, this ship my hands cupped in front of me, a beggar's bowl, a scooped out moon, a mouth opened to make noiseless screams, to arrange, to begin, to break through to stop my arrogance, believing what I touch, see, feel, hear, taste, make a case for being alive, so I can stop believing what happens when a caterpillar dreams itself beautiful.

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