The Tuesday Platform

Chinese New Year

by Lynda Hull

                                       

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows

  pasted with colored squares, past the man

who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past

  crates of doves and roosters veiled

until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets

  with sulphur as people exchange gold

and silver foil, money to appease ghosts

  who linger, needy even in death. I am

almost invisible. Hands could pass through me

  effortlessly. This is how it is

to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows

  untranslatable as the shop signs,

the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle

  in the stairwell, the corridor where

the doors are blue months ajar. Hands

  gesture in the smoke, the partial moon

of a face. For hours the soft numeric

  click of mah-jongg tiles drifts

down the hallway where languid Mai trails

  her musk of sex and narcotics.

There is no grief in this, only the old year

  consuming itself, the door knob blazing

in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel.

  Between voices and fireworks

wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush—

  no language I want to learn. I can touch

the sill worn by hands I’ll never know

  in this room with its low table

where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign

  for Jade Palace sheds green corollas

on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here

  in the chastening glow, darkening

my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest

  of my life widening away from me, waiting

for the man I married to pass beneath

  the sign of the building, to climb

the five flights and say his Chinese name for me.

  He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets

where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where

  the new year is liquor, the black bottle

the whole district is waiting for, like

  some benevolent arrest—the moment

when men and women turn to each other and dissolve

  each bad bet, every sly mischance,

the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight

  the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway.

He brings fish. He brings lotus root.

  He brings me ghost money.  

It's open link day in the Imaginary Garden. Please link up a poem of your choice, and take some time during the week to visit others who have shared their poems. We look forward to sharing with you!