your colour, will bring you luck,
and if not … He trailed off. First hold it to your forehead,
then the back of your neck. Then blow. I unscrunched the ball.
Now put it here, he said, opening his wallet, and money please.
I had no cash. Nothing? He looked me in the eyes and said
(again) that he was a holy man. I felt honour-bound
to give him something. Up and down the street, men rode
to their important offices. I told him it was my favourite
colour, or had been, and as I did I saw us from a distance,
as we might seem years from now – scraps of coloured fabric
draped across a hall which, taken out of context, signified
nothing – and I flinched, waiting for the blade to fall.
Mother Country
The shades open for landing,
I see the pandan-leafed
interior expanding
towards the edge of a relieved
horizon. Down along
the banks of the Ciliwung
are slums I had forgotten,
the river like a loosely
sutured wound. As we begin
our descent into the black
smog of an emerging
power, I make out the tin
shacks, the stalls selling juices,
the red-tiled colonial
barracks, the new mall.
It is raining profusely.
After years of her urging
me to go, me holding back,
I have no more excuses.
State-Building
Break a vase, says Derek Walcott, and the love
that reassembles the fragments will be stronger than
that love which took its symmetry for granted.
When I read this, I can only think who broke it?
In the British Museum, two black ‘figures’
(they don’t say slaves) beat olives from a tree;
a ‘naked youth’ stoops to gather the fallen
fruit. The freeborn men elsewhere, safe behind
their porticos, argue about the world’s
true form, or talk of bee glue, used
to seal the hive against attack, later called
propolis, meaning that it has to come
before – is crucial for – the building of a state.
*
Here it’s summer and bees groan inside
the carcass of a split bin bag. A figure passes,
is close to passed, when I see her face, half
shadow, marked with sweat or tears, the folds
beneath each downcast eye the same light
brown as – oceans off – my grandma. Mak.
Give me a love that’s unassimilated, sharp
as broken pots. That can’t be taken; granted.
My dad would work among the blue and white
pieces of a Ming vase – his job to get it
passable. He’d gather every bit and after days
assembling, filling in (putty, spit, glue),
draw forth – not sweetness – something new.
Lines of Flight
Mariinsky Canal
A girl twists a stalk of rye
around her wrist like
a bracelet. She sees her father
at the plough and wants
to pick a cornflower, its dark
blue almost purple
colour threaded through
with grief, among the weeds.
She wants to go and pin
one to his chest. And all this
is implied, though
the photograph itself
shows just a field of rye
with cornflowers.
Diyarbakır
One day, a white rabbit read
my fortune, twitching as it chose
from several slips of paper, soft head
straining at its harness, nose
scabbed, peeled back like bark.
Here, amid the desert, stark
as day, they tortured dissidents;
now paper slips blow between
the points of a barbed wire fence.
A life should not just be, but mean.
Illinois
The familiar, unearthly
scent of Bayside Breeze.
On the freeway, bent
along
