Jingxian Diptych
I.
I remember riding the rusty bus from Nanjing
to Jingxian when I was sixteen. My father beside me,
we were thrown around our seats, like stowaways
on a capsizing ship. Snow-flecked mountains,
slanted redwoods and dogwoods around us, I
slept in their grey-green shadows.
A Chinese action film flickered on the screen
while people flicked ashes out of the window.
Persimmons and peaches rolling on the floor,
skin slimy and blackened, their owners drooling,
dreaming, cranes returning home. When we arrived
at my father’s hometown, I could smell the crisp
air of Huangshan. A small river carved the town
into two, orbs of light dancing on the water
like lanterns bobbing by. Tai chi masters wave
at us, radios perched on marble, humming
the notes of a Chinese opera. Above us, bulbuls
and thrushes land on wooden beams,
watching people on stools slurping noodles
and sipping osmanthus wine. The needles
of pine trees drift into the cracks of cobblestones,
red ink on Xuan paper, the careless calligraphy
of winter.
II.
Now, no bus goes to Jingxian.
In my father’s car, I see shiny asphalt oozing
out of the earth like phlegm, snaking towards
the horizon, smothering the pale blue sky.
Chalk-white tree stumps jut out, the crooked teeth
of ghosts, fading in the half-light.
Overhead, trains speed past us. Progress
hurls itself into a partridge, its cry drowned
out by a shrieking horn. We enter tunnel
after tunnel, the concrete echoing the screech
of car tires, see the dammed Qingyi river,
waves of purple struggling to break down walls
of metal. I imagine schools of angelfish
and arowana helpless against the current,
blinded by the silt and sediment, the sudden,
sickening crash. Back in Jingxian, the heat ebbs
under glass and steel moons. Mountains of sand
submerge the cobblestones, and excavators
whirr around the town’s first mall. Iron rebars
of KFC, Starbucks and Nike stores take root
into the earth, unshakeable. By a yellowed river,
oleanders wilt, praying for the butterflies to return
by spring.
*
Xingyu is reading literature at NTU. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Portside Review, QLRS and Cordite Poetry Review.
