[Rustling along at 79, foliage wind aided? papi?
You'd think he'd spend his homestretch days on a park bench
under a leaf hallowed tree in Brooklyn; shepherd dog lazing,
smiling at school kids; at summer skirts
worn shorter and shorter as he aged year after year.
His gods?
"The Chinese, son." He lectures me on
acupuncture, herb tea, organic crops to halt global hunger.
His secret?
He takes the subway Saturdays to Chinatown (risks
jostled body falling bones.) What game's he
after? a kitchen steaming soups? wizened Chinese pals smoking
glass pipes, doing Tai chi? He has no Chinese tongue.
Ma complained (until she passed) he'd take off
every weekend, return with a bag of scallion basil bamboo shoots
as if he'd been shopping (if only; her folded heart, still bridal
in trust, would not play dragon and shadow)
His face glowed like the first hours of Chinese New Year.
His clothes whiffed of petal scents
as from popped tulip pods. Some witch,
she swore, had switched his body. (Some kneading hands,
upyielding lips kindle his mottled quick, I think)
Mon. Tue. Wed. she'd feel cat growl and eyes on her. She'd turn
& snap, deer stare and for no reason; wondering what's come
over me? over him? old lion
padding 'round his cage; waiting
for Saturday: subway, the spoor; paw marked rides to hills in flower
heavens in body]-W.W.
THE HABIT OF MEN
Human's a habit, a man struggling
not to become his chair stretched and ripped
like a sinew, a pirate pulling
a cutlass on the numbness
of his drunken brothers bent
on raping one another's sisters,
a monk taking hammer and chisel
to fashion gargoyles after the same
brothers who think him an ass,
a man pointing a path through
difficult mountains to his woman
who sweetly insists that they remain
on flatter ground a woman's habit,
a child pulling her balloons
behind her as she dashes
across green fields towards a cold room
in which her husband lies slabbed and tagged,
a bored queen lusting for the life-blood
of her maid about to crown
their king with flowers but reaching
instead for consolatory sweets,
a naked girl becoming the words
she reads opening her thighs to flip
through their leaves, a pallid girl
without a face who knows how
to read but has no desire to be
read, numb in her cocoon of icy
blue, a woman reading yet one more
book of herself by the light
of a man's lamp hovering
over her like a centurion,
a woman kneeling before herself,
trying to rise out of herself by
herself only to be trapped
in webs of her own spinning,
a woman about to slake her thirst
at the spring between her lover's thighs
that gives more than she would surrender,
two women putting an end
to their habit numb of men.
(from "Gifts Of Screws" by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 