Quayside
Poetry by Evelyn Lau
After hearing the news
of your cancer, for days I felt hungry.
The tulips hung their heads in the hot room.
Sunlight pressed my forehead
like a feverish hand, and the white bed
came unmoored, a raft on a sea of nightmares.
Then I walked down to the marina, and through
the transparent water saw a sea star,
purple as wine, splashed on a rock,
a crab showing me its soft belly,
the bouquet of stones in blues and greys
as rare as orchids—and then I saw that for years
you have existed all around me
like they say heaven already does,
your voice which hour after hour slipped over my skin
like silk, so that even now when I close my eyes
I am clothed in it, there, in the green office
where we had for years and years
our one conversation. I was always waiting
for you, and when you arrived shivering
and smiling in the glass doorway,
wearing your woven coat, of which you said
there was only one in the whole world,
together we climbed the cigarette-stained stairs
to the room we built with words.
Here a Granny Smith apple bobs in the saltwater,
skin green as paint, and a seagull stabs it with its beak
while another circles nearby, weeping
with want, and when I look again the apple
is in the mouth of a crow carrying it to a rooftop,
and then beyond, into the sky.
The bed of crushed mussel shells, bruise-black,
the silent glide of the scarlet freighter,
the wind slapping my face awake
to the world somersaulting blue and brazen—
I am gulping the air flavoured with metal and shellfish,
stretching to take it in, salt sting, seagrass,
gold pollen detonating in the breeze, the profusion
of it, this life you return to me, this one life.
