More Poetry by Qianxi Teng

Wanting Words

We have passed roads of empty cars

and picked our way through mimosa

strangling the cement headstones.

Yours is near the graveyard's centre,

near a tree flaming with orange petal-tongues.

I could not name the day of your birth or death,

but walk to your row and number

with more instinct than memory.

A name writes itself in red characters,

a square-jawed stare is bleak and cracked.

This year my aunt brings cupcakes,

ash-dusted coffee, purple orchids

and cigarettes lit on a red candle

in one swift gesture. Joss paper

crumbles in a rusty barrel.

These we never come without;

we who remember you:

Cantonese housemaid, chain-smoker,

auto-didact who died having captured

an illiterate carpenter,

not knowing your son will write Chinese articles

and your granddaughter English poems –

everything silenced by poverty and nicotine

resurfacing like the set of your jaw

in other mouths born of a woman

wanting words no-one would give.

Anniversary

According to the Chinese legend of the White Snake, a dumpling sold by an immortal stuck in a little boy's throat for three days. When it finally fell out, it was swallowed by a white snake, which turned into an immortal woman. After 18 years, she went in search of the boy, now a man, and married him. After many misadventures and adversities, the couple finally settled down with their son and lived a normal family life.

Today our child, home from school, announces

that he has learnt a new word – 蛇 . I tell him what it is,

then fall (as I have for years

when I see someone who might listen) into silence.

You will never tell him that his mother was once

a snake, a glorified 虫 and I convince

myself that I have forgotten the time I lived

in cool dark water under the bridge,

white and slim and glittering with scales,

an ivory livewire in the deepness.

That was before the dumpling

with three days of your life fell

like a star, streaming a grape-cluster tail

of bubbles in its silent tumbling

into my mouth. I could have spat

but I swallowed in fright,

and a new-born woman was swimming through the air,

trying to find you, my ignorant dear,

still thinking you saved me from

my watery home.

Ten years married, and I know you wonder

if there is more snake in our child

than I think. They say he is the village's best swimmer,

as if his blood remembers it once flowed

in a wetter, deeper place. I'm glad for you

that his face is like yours but somehow

when he moves he reminds me of

what I thought I didn't remember. The love

between water and white scale lies

in my heart like a burnt-out star, deferred

for ten years. Now it flares each time our boy writhes

with a joy that has no need for any word.

*蛇 – the Chinese character for “snake”

虫 – the Chinese character for “worm”