Components

by Helena Jiang

Somewhere else:
the mother bear passed a paw across her child’s head,
while informing him of some stories remote,
about how somewhere else,
somewhere faraway in time there were a pair of shoes,
vest-pocket size,
one of them red and the other yellow,
fell rafting in a river.
Upon the soil where their owner intended his spoors,
a jug lay emptied like a fractured face.
After the rain,
she continued,
the most impudent saplings kneeled
under the darkness’s sway—
the indigo branches smeared on all margins of the pharmist’s handbook
poured down and danced its shades,
so that he could but sigh, sought for another five hundred brands of nose,
and but sigh for the loss of his own,
the strayed hue of his concocted dawn.
See these clouds:
emaciated ribs of persecuted sky.
See stuffed eyes stuffing dead boles,
and the blades of grass softened,
into thousand necks that fawned.
Thus heed, alas! when find yourself traipsing.
Avoid those cracks and lines on the cement;
afraid pray you be
of leaking out of the vessel of this earth.

When finding himself gone and grown the child bear in the end ponders,
intuits
that silent nights compensate,
shelter,
bless.
And so he laughs in bellowing gags.
(and so a trunk collapse, and the sedge hovers)
And so he presses his ear
(the one that held the mother’s breaths)
upon the dial,
and listens carefully to the bile,
goes pit and pat and pit-a-pat.
And so he calculates the rest that can be savoured,
for after all this lane is free
from the end of hammers upon the door,
from the voice that would dub in plaintive rhyme:
Child dear,
open up; this is mother with her warn.

He counts the margin, augurs the glut:
Like buzzing ants…
Like hustling ants.

Helena Jiang is an undergraduate majoring in English Language and Literature at Shanghai International Studies University, China.