xiàndài

when hyundai released the first elantra (code name J1) in october 1990 germany had just pieced herself back together and the literate world was reeling from an ice age so epic there was still the taste of frost left in american diners. my sister was writing her first diary entry sitting cross legged in the sand where the lighthouse rose like roses above the salt cliffs. the sea breaking white against stone shores, the sky thinning so when the church bells pealed over heimøya we could see them swing. how warm the sun when march ends and sun rises, and how warm it was when i laid back flat to black gravel, listening to the vibrations of the stars.

somehow i remember you dancing fisted into a summer dark, the grass blown so high around you your body is swallowed again and again in shadow as the night passes, mouthful by mouthful. in contrast, our father’s eyes are colorless in my memory. i dream a dream where you shatter under him in ripples, your body floating outwards, the tide cresting higher and higher, soaking the dew-soaked petal drops of your shoulders. in 1990 mandela emerged sightless from twenty-seven years of sightlessness, the cold tightened so firmly around his neck he wore it out for months. a girl in black leather stood at the brandenburg gate and craned her neck back for cranes. for the birds that flew south three decades before and were cresting the horizon like tide, incandescent. each feathered crest swallowing little mouthfuls of the sun and letting it seep out in droplets. i count them. i sit in an empty room and make music with my own tongue, wet and warm. wet and warm like a summer dark where you take my hand. you pull me back in through the front door and say our father is asleep and you are ready.

in 1990 it was the year of the horse and a woman forded the qianshanhong canal where twenty years later i knelt with my body half submerged. where blindness revealed itself hour by hour, and i slipped up and down the stairs in a stretched dark for water, the stars facing upwards in the cupped bowl of my hands. powdered glass spilling through my fingers as they opened. the sky, a mason jar, directing light through the open doorway where i pulled aside the curtain and came in with the sun. to a room empty of music, where i was the lighthouse and an ocean away you woke into the midnight, blinded by the suggestion of my face inside the blueness.

she only said, softly, that the train was coming in to jattavagen, and three streets down my mother gave birth. she only said, softly, that the moon was crushing whitecaps to sand, and where its mast broke the clouds it fell norwegian rain. she only said, softly, that the cold was someone looking who loved you, and if love existed once it never ceased. she only said, softly, that the stars were where she had scraped out the sky, so if she heard my voice echo where i stood between the bluff islands, she could peer through them, one eye at a time, and see the shape her brother made against the sand, his face emerging from suggestion into evidence, trembling with cold.