Girls who play Guqin have beautiful hands.
Pale
long fingers
dancing—swaying, flickering
—across the strings
of woven silk.
The sound echoes in your bones.
The resonance of steel
—a river coursing through earth.
Yet
so very soft, tender.
—smoke lingering in air.
Like bamboo.
White silk on the gown
of an Empress.
Melodies transcending dynasties—
The sky and the soil are held in
everything we make;
the earth breathes in the pentatonic scale.
This, I take pride in.
But these
are roots that will
never
feel like my own.
Disconnection
is the color of
china blue.
Cerulean veins on milk white urns—
the kind of stillness that you hold your breath
in the presence of.
Cold. Like
my mother’s Qipao.
Fine blue and white
chafes against my body:
a pebble weathered by
another sea.
Cold as my skin is warm.
Unmixing
as oil
and water.
My name means knowing peace.
Jia Wen.
It carries the weight of an ocean:
Bliss; serenity at the bottom of a
lake.
Its consonants are gentle,
Tailored to
take flight
from
one’s lips
like a loving whisper.
Yet the way it disconnects
from my own
pricks of foreign air.
‘300 Poems of the Tang Dynasty’.
Summer evenings with my mother
at the small kitchen table
as she teaches me to recite each verse.
I sought escape
then. Peeled at the shriveled paint
underneath the chair.
I can no longer read those delicate lines.
The language is still my own
but its characters,
its intimacy
have
slipped
through the cracks of my memory.
In the glass box I keep,
a collection of recollections,
unreleased.
I take them out and run my fingers
over the pages.
These are the things I used to know.
And yet
Feeling escapes past disconnection.
Heng Shui
—steady waters
is the name of my Grandmother’s hometown.
The spices of that place
The bamboo flute
My father’s dialect
touches my
bones in a way that nothing ever could.
And so
My hands fall through
the longing
as they fall through shui muo paintings:
transient ink and mist.
The knowledge that my heritage exists
ingrained in me
Never to touch, only to keep—wisps that
surround me, protect me.
A river through earth, smoke lingering in air.
The way it should be.
And so,
The sound of the Guqin is homesickness.
乡思
A nostalgia for a hometown
so very past.
And every so
often, for a time you have never lived.
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