The Story of Aunt Lee

The room is a big hollow.

Months and years burnished some grey bricks

white, and some glimmering black.

Crumbs of clay quietly drop, time

Erects the solidity of the walls’ enclosure.

The empty room is filled with floating auras

Sunlight emblazing the lattice window

Children discard the play with the shadows

Run out of room, to play on the plaza.

Hopscotch, seek-and-hide, rubber-band skipping

Grasses green then yellow, the sugar-figures blowing man

replaces the woman who sold balloons, colorful wheels of

pinwheel turning on and on. Dandelions fly apart to the azure.

The strobilus of the phoenix trees cracked, pollens draw

vanishing sound traces in the golden sky. Wind blowing

through the lanes, sands rush into the eyes before the dusk.

Boys and girls in adolescent back up, look at each other

strange and familiar.

Lanes disappeared in the plaza

The plaza stretches out the roads

The young girl drops down the game and stands

Outside the circle of square, looking around and far

The sun is setting, evening glow stacked up

an iridescent hallucination castle.

Twilight in dense color waits with patience.

Once he waited me with his bicycle outside the town

He carried me with my girl friend, I, sat on the crossbar

His sister was a doctor. I went to visit his home

Only his mother there, I blushed, not knowing what to say.

He held tickets for a movie, smudged machine oil still on the hands

I asked was that everyone had a ticket? He lowered his head.

To be loved in the youth is beautiful, isn’t it?

At that time, he is the one I must have liked

We have had good times, now we are getting old

For months we would not have sex

But how he looked at that woman! His voice!

How could it be completely different?

He is a nice man.

Black out now, it’s still early till he comes back from Mah-jongg

Aunt Lee lies down in her silent night of twenty years.

The wind puffs away human’s whisper, only night stays

The plaza naked under the starlight

Tinkling, jingling, broken beads rolling down

Black pupils of the dark lanes exchange no words

Roads gleamingly loom like the patterns of the palm

The children in dreams stretch muscles and bones

Will wake up, build rooms, and murmur to oneself.