On What It Comes To
Tan Tien
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As usual, the first gate was
modest. It is dilapidated. She can’t tell
which bridge crossed the moat,
which all cross sand now, disordered with footsteps.
It’s a precise overlay of
circles on squares, but she has trouble locating
the main avenue and retraces
her steps in intense heat for the correct entrance,
which was intentionally
blurred, the way a round arch can give onto a red wall,
far enough in back of the arch
for sun to light.
If being by yourself separates
from your symmetry, which is
the axis of your spine in the
concrete sense, but becomes a suspension
in your spine like a layer of
sand under the paving stones of a courtyard
or on a plain, you have to
humbly seek out a person who can listen to you,
on a street crowded with
bicycles at night, their bells ringing.
And any stick or straight line
you hold can be your spine,
like a map she is following in
French of Tan Tien. She wants space to fall
to each side of her like
traction, not weight dispersed within a mirror. At any time,
an echo of what she says will
multiply against the walls in balanced,
dizzying jumps like a
gyroscope in the heat, but she is alone.
Later, she would remember
herself as a carved figure and its shadow on a blank board,
but she is her balancing
stick, and the ground to each side of her is its length,
disordered once by an armored
car, and once by an urn of flowers at a crossing.
The stick isn’t really the
temple’s bisection around her, like solstice or ancestor.
This Tang Dynasty peach tree
would be parallel levitation in the spine
the person recording
it.
Slowly the hall looms up. The
red stair’s outline gives way to its duration
as it extends and rises at a
low angle.
In comparison to the family,
the individual hardly counts, but they all
wait for her at a teahouse
inside the wall.
First the gold knob, then blue
tiers above the highest step,
the same color as the sky.
When one person came to gain
confidence,
she imagines he felt symmetry
as flight after his fast among seven meteorites
in the dark. He really felt
like a globe revolving within a globe.
Even the most singular or
indivisible particle or heavenly sphere will adjust
when the axis extending beyond
itself is pushed, or the sphere it is within
is pushed. What she thought
was her balance flattens into a stylized dragon
on the marble paving stones.
Yet she’s reluctant to leave
the compound. Only the emperor
could walk its center line.
Now, anyone can imagine how it felt
to bring heaven news. She is
trying to remember this in Hong Kong
as the tram pulls suddenly
above skyscrapers and the harbor
and she flattens against her
seat, like a reversal occurring in the poles,
or what she meant by, no one
can imagine how.
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