Two Poems: Yellow Lane Diaries and Chinese New Year at Bow Barracks

I cannot know. No matter.

I am in that warm sleep

On a Bow Barracks roof,

Or was,

As I fell asleep with a kite

On that ransomed afternoon

When the buildings bled in my dream.

Tar-blind, sun-swarmed — 

Dark, that illumines Bow Street,

Light, that seals the eyes of Bow Barracks roofs —

The kite ignored the late-winter jibes

Of the wind under its feathers

And slept on,

Like me,

Like an epithet

Alive to soundless fall of verbs

On dust and ether,

But only in inaction.

Still sleeping, already roused,

Everything was warm

And red

As though I wore the skin

Of my stomach

On my bones,

And last night’s vineyard had wetted it again.

It would soon be evening

And a city held its breath,

Noisily,

In the long sigh of traffic.

Rising,

Mid-Afternoon,

On the rooftops of Bow Barracks

When the sun sees the wall

Through bars of flesh;

When shadows rise and fall

Athwart

The red warmth of a still-beating heart

That the anatomy lesson of the afternoon

Had uncovered

In the grey innards of the city,

I was snared by light:

Snared

As it rode the knuckles of brick

Like a lover’s uphill and downhill tour

Of his beloved’s hand.

It was the flush of touch,

The blood of waiting

On the impatience of a city

As it, still, made up its mind.

Was it a drum that had breached

The skin of my tiredness,

Wrinkled, not taut with sleep?

Or was it

The madness of labour

Making idle gaps in masonry

South of my Bow Barracks eyrie

From where you could spy

Anxious residents converse

With angels through rusting girders

And missing panes?

The morning had been spent 

In breathing

(Despite the scent of sewers and soya sauce),

The particular essence

Of vermillion

That casts a shadow in the light,

And blue, pellucid,

That absorbed them:

The buildings and the sky,

The hair and the hat,

The bristle between

Of February mornings.

Little Samara was looking upwards.

Did she believe as the Chinese poets did

That moss was impossibly slick,

Even without rain?

She gazed up leaking drain-pipes:

The lethargy of plumbing

Making the lethargy of her gaze

Appear like a tint no one knew

Could be deepened.

Her gaze held the reflection of mountains

That ambushed you from those red walls.

But, did she know

That this far up, Pines need no wind to sing?

The hand had fallen in love

With the echo of its handiwork.

Why else would I find all around

The quiet, red monk,

(That is a Bow Barracks morning),

The sight of stooped workmen

Building prisons? —

Prisons that save us from freedom

In our rangings to find

Safety from ranging

In our city.

Lances of drum-shout

Pierce through to the red lanterns

Like a cool wind promenading on Bow Street,

Fingering them

And wishing sleeping residents

A happy Chinese New Year.

But somewhere,

The raised voices of workmen

Is becoming concrete.

What Lenten pleasures then of wine, fruit and abstinence?

The red back of the roasted pig

That made candles and a dragon’s lust bleed red 

Also made Bow Barracks glow

Like burning charcoal,

Singeing the night dew.

Feasting during a fast,

I would rather let

The Ancestors and Jesus Christ

Settle the matter,

Across the breadth

Of Mr. Liao’s drawing room.

Such beginnings can agitate

Even stone to precious longing,

And Bow Barracks is no stone

In the sun.

The tanned sound that escapes

Southern balconies

In the morning —

Strauss, distressed,

Because of its too-smooth sliding —

Makes its way down to me 

Through the hide and bone of drums

Ushering in dragon-immanence. 

It often sounds like Berlioz

By the time it is on the street,

Or Doubt,

That is a cuckoo-clock gone mad

Because it has missed the hour

In its daydream of some grand symphony.

The photographer stood up

On the roof of the afternoon,

Beside the kite,

Above the drums.

Stood to attention

As though the red neighbourhood

Of Bow Barracks had called,

Called to say:

“Move into the clear,

Keep still,

Take your place

In the bareness of your fear,

Out in the place,

And look down

On your own face.”