ContactDoubled Shadows: Selected Poems of Ouyang Jianghe
Dinner
(from the 2010 issue of Zoland Poetry)
After the spice and wind meet, I wait
for a meal that has entered flame
to enter metal. The pot is full
of years accumulated like snow, falling
upward now, from my fingertips to my temples.
I will be eating this dinner till I am bent with age.
There will not be
another morning. Last night, at a roadside
hotpot joint, by the light of a candle, I ordered
dinner for two. Lettuce hearts,
fish, thin nestled slices. In two
glasses of beer, flights of bubbles
suspended.
I waited for the check
while a toothpick whittled from an elephant's tooth
retraced its course through a constellation
of aches, minor eclipses
of sustenance. There will not be another morning.
On the guttering TV screen, the evening
news repeated its single headline:
the deceased have died
another death.
A glance, a couple words.
For those who all these years have watched
and listened. I see
what it comes to, and I pay.
There will not be another morning, or
another night.
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