3 poems
Lydia Cheng, 1987
The landscape warps if you look too closely, each mile marker astake it billows around. The skin of the highway shimmers & dissolves into infinite horizon. We drive endlessly west, always following the sun as it sets. Kanorado loves me, it loves me not.
The words dissolve on the tongue, the tongue dissolves—a lump of sugar or another cloud as it glides into place & disappears. I’ve never measured anything by the flight of any bird. I’m told we’re neighbors. To me they remain strangers.
As we head further west, gnarled shapes emerge from the kneeling cloud bank—lions chasing their own tails, sentences broken off halfway. The spiny wreckage casts long shadows over a wide, snarling plain.
We are in this place because it is good. It is a good place, because we are in it. The sunlight strips these clouds like lingerie, every highway milky with rain, every semi a steaming monolith, a fixed & immovable distance ahead of us.
Calla Lily, 1984
The lily stretches its skin—rolls up & crashes back on itself. The stem runs long & into darkness, slips through to an endless celebration of light. A brilliant flash,
the indistinct chatter of human revelry all around. Glittering bodies hover below the ceiling of a decaying ballroom, kissing passionately among dusty chandeliers. Some have their eyes closed or their backs to us, some preen or pose, some look dead into the camera.
This is the other world below us, the substrate of time past. In this one, they look ebullient. In this one, they look heartsick. The party is winding down. The lily opens herself in one continuous thrust away from the dark. Her roots build a sun-white city on the other side.
There are lovers in the city, there are wives coming home from work, there are husbands coming home, every one, every wild thing, is coming home. They have endured a great hardship here. They have endured a lot of pain. They make love so completely here. The lily curls in & lives all these things, all these lives.
There is a blue jay spotlit on a concrete palace. There is a sword carrying an umbrella. There is a last, perfect kiss before the revelers stream out onto the lawn, ties missing, mascara running. The lily stretches. The other world leans in.
Self-Portrait, 1985 / 1986 / 1988
Everything you will experience, every idea or piece of information you receive, every thought, originates in the body. The body is the only fact, the only thing you can really be sure of.
& yet, the body betrays. The body eludes & evades. What a special pain, that of the betraying body. But the body provides the only metric against which to register the betrayal.
How can a body be said to be wrong? Given the body’s propensity to defy the mind, how can it be said to be right? Which is more authentic, the container or its contents? What if they are both made of the same thing?
When you look at something long enough, close enough, it dissolves. When you think on something long enough, it breaks down: When two mirrors face each other, from which can the light be said to originate?
I don’t want to be body. I want to be something else. Wide open, field, sky, ocean, mountain. Something really grand. I don’t want to be mirror anymore, I want to be light.