Clayton Lo
Two poems translated from the Chinese by May Huang
Braille Book
Let us patiently prepare some trivial offerings
First, dissolve the touch of your palm with soap in warm water
Fixate on that irrational faucet, slamming against the sink’s tough throat
Like an OCD patient. The dull pain vaporizing midair
Above a wound absorbs suspended spotlights, slowly floats to the surface
Becoming a sharp syllable in the vestiges of memory, inhaling the icy floor
The hour hand stays at four p.m., starts from a dried-up concept in time
The novel I listened to has been translated into the smell of singed plastic
I clutch a braille book on the shelf as if it were a handrail at the pool
Fingers focus slower than eyesight, only the sound of a painful cough
May reclaim itself anew. In the space between concepts and characters
The second hand walks thirty steps. The exercise books from my primary days
Didn’t wipe my memory clean. When a small dot appears before my finger
I forget what came before. Don’t shun the sunlight seeping through the curtains
Without it, I would have no reason to live
Whenever I recite one idea and forget another, I always remember
The churches in the city’s business district
Blindly carrying out the Holy Communion every day for no one at all
Losing
Losing one’s eyesight is no long-winded story
In the days of discovering lost objects
Some things always go unnoticed
Losing the slanting sun on a summer day
The consistency of red bean ice, losing all work! Opportunity
Is the shame and monotony that follows loss
Losing all foreign movie subtitles, romance, and melancholy
Losing all friends, the girl in the tank-top at Mong Kok,
A long-haired cat, a bright spring day
Losing bankbooks, television, newspapers
Books, especially books, I thought I found a way to retrieve
But they never appeared
What else can I lose? Don’t think that lost eyesight
Can be exchanged for sound, lost time
Is not a weight that can be measured
Losing a library, the Internet, hundreds of art galleries
Losing the intricacy of theatre, a script to recite, losing music
Losing, that is, every form of communication
So, losing even more may not be a disaster
Enlarged screens, computers, braille typewriters, each exchange is
A procession of losses, even precious feelings start to dull
Losing an art, a life, a relationship, a sense
Losing a promising writer, poems, and memory
Yet you are concerned with how things will unfold?
If losing a body is better, at that moment
Lines lost their color, rhythms lost their meter
Meaning revolved around an abstract dot
Losing a partner means losing some streets
A memory that keeps unraveling, rebuilding. What about odor?
Temperature, light, and wind
Night and pulse, anger
The meek and guilty, one or more
Comparable cities. I still remember the sky,
Paper, and the flickering lights of islands on the other shore,
Still remember the video games in the display window
And friendships of the same speed
So, let loss stray farther from its Bishopian rhythm
Of course, losing is no disaster
Especially when it returns to us with an anxious body