FOG CLIMBS THE ROOFTOP

in memory of the old Hualien house, burned down

Whenever fog arrives, I remember

the old Hualien house on Chongqing Street,

so cloaked in white smoke it disappeared

but for the roofline,

like an overexposed photo.

How I’d sit there, three years old,

as fog at dawn crept across the rooftiles,

muffling the mountain train

that snaked down the rails,

invisible, the sky both near and far

faintly trembling.

Rivers flow from heaven

and return. This one too,

rain-swollen when Piwa dove in,

went under, and didn’t come up.

His friends and brother gathered his clothes,

walked weeping single file up Huagang mountain,

each entering the past’s

undeveloped film.

On the rooftop where fog shifts,

the door to one image opens on another.

Like a lightning flash that never fades,

the house burns till daybreak,

its flames bright against Huagang Mountain.

At forty, alone one February afternoon

with my forty year old camera,

I walk Chongqing Street

where the river used to flow.

Far off, the whine of the sawmill,

the grumbling train.

Through the camera

leaping teeth of flame,

a frantic shout: number six, is it six?

Then silence,

and across the road

slant sunlight

on a massage parlor.

My heart possessed by dawn fog

rises like smoke from the rooftop

of a house that is no more.