I Wish I were a Tang Horse

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I wish I were a Tang Horse

The jar on the window sill carved out in your image. With painted stories that shape the holes you left. Next to it, the profile of a child with a belly full of sad. I sat in the space by the kitchen between the cutlery stand and the door frame, exactly the right size. The shape of you and the size of me: mother and child.

Chocolate brown walls and the government issue beige corduroy couch. Your feet up on that large square table with the game of solitaire: 32 marbles and 33 holes. Right in the middle, the space not occupied. I watched on from the space I occupied. Hanging above the wrought iron Indonesian lamp that swung and creaked during typhoon Ellen. I saw you watch those 80s dancers with their pastel leg warmers and how happy you looked. We had to be quiet, this was your time. 

The blue and white vases in the lounge, painted with dots and chickens, from the lanes near where you worked in Central. Blue irises and blue and white wedding China carefully stacked like our apartment in a tall building on Po Shan Road. A miscellany of pottered patterns, a pentimento of painted agony. Your blue pen and your lovely writing, short hand and long; remote and long gone but still here somewhere. Washable Parker ink, blue stained on your fingers, cold in the emptied air.

You gave me your moles but they wandered disobedient, not nicely placed like a trilogy on your discerning, gweipor face but inconsequential and ordinary: just a shoulder, the side of my leg. Yours were rare and special, mine are just moles. The dots I bear form an unlikely companionship with the cantata of your withdrawal - melanocytes and Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.

I wish I were a Tang horse: I could climb inside your image and be part of you again in a juncture of circular time. The perpetual stillness, preserved and knowable, rearing up and yet caught in a lie of time. I wonder about that November and how it came to be. How we flew over Bahrain, how we had to land. You were so ill, we were so afraid. And later you died.

Red painted toenails and a champagne satin pantsuit, big hair and your three moles in that one blurry photo. The hot and cold taps swirling below, your hair leaning over me like a waterfall of cells, our shared DNA in a cascade of white noise. I remember your white hooded dressing gown, the clatter of a typewriter. Working but kind. So little remains of so much. At least I have you in our ginger jars.