thirty-eight

thirty eight 
october 1994, beijing

Shipwreck timbers in Nun Mill Bay cc-by-sa2.0 – © Walter Baxter – geograph.org.ukp3507664

eighteen
i wrote of my ‘unusual’ age
a wind blowing straight out
of the sunset into my eye
			into my heart
			a mood of the sea.

thirty-eight
 land-locked  on days
a clear sky falls to me
i remember the sea
i came from

how the sand’s shaped round
 beached timbers left

ribs  keel  of an old  s h  i     p
become a strangeness of the
				shore

Copyright © 2021 Peter Le Baige. All Rights Reserved

The music for the reading is from the ‘Largo’ movement of Cello Sonata Op. 40 (1934) by Dimiti Shostakovich, performed here by the composer himself on piano and Mstislav Rostropovich on cello.

chinese ink wash

chinese ink wash
june 2011, beijing

‘Old Trees, Level Distance’ by Guo Xi, China, Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), with acknowledgements to the website of Metropolitan Museum of Art for use of this image. 

gone over
twenty years
my father
is a chinese
ink wash
you might find
deep in a library
between covers
under tracing
paper or
hung at the
back of a chinese
grocery near the
waterfront above
the co. ltd. name
and calendar month
an ink wash
nothing clear about it
yet it draws you
in and onward
into those spaces,
not the lines that

blowing out

blowing out
19 july 2021
riverside ave

autumn haberdashery in a window display as imagined by a cat with an umbrella

the fading
god of autumn
haberdashery
at the bus stop
in answer to my
question that touched
him like a breeze
on his loose shoulder
whispered to me
in boarding that
the length of any
life was just a
minute, the minute
in which you
are, every other
time was just
leaves in the making
leaves in the falling
we only have a
minute and he
waved like a
gull sheering off