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Chinese Whispers ‘It always turns out that much is salvageable.’ — John Ashbery (1927–2017) Have you heard how we light up the houses  so they last forever, pyres of cardboard and joss  with laughter in the windows, late guests  dressed in their best clothes for a midnight ball  and all the old flames still dancing, long past  the hour? We cannot count the pairs (stacks of legal tender for a bank above, a paper chariot sent to speed the road ahead,  shoes without soles: what use are they to ghosts?… ) each one tossed across the chasm becoming its better, each translated without loss, salient as prayer I was a phantom for a day, you said and we believed you then, set our own spells to paper like fire so they would catch, would work with some new and unheard-of efficacy or even travel whole continents in a night as yours could, held aloft by the heat of their own significance, only to be visible a while from this world, from ours, but also from yours or whichever you resolved to inhabit then or (having gone yourself now where we cannot understand) might so alight or ever will and without end. 8
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My Grandfather Visits Pyongyang Too late, we find among his photographs a kingdom mostly dreamed of, its absurd architecture where he alighted some time in October. Frame after frame resists comparison. There isn’t a place we’ve seen that stands as still, or with the same intent raises its glass towards heaven, all normalcy locked within a sound these pictures don’t contain – a pitch rung in the earth’s confines, too low for human hearing. Friends tell us to allow ourselves the time it takes to grieve, or whatever brings us back to last year’s long continuum, but something stays the eye. How in some perspectives he’s already gone, gone from the boulevards where wide-crowned trees fill up the viewfinder, and men and women in work clothes hover 9

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Chinese Whispers

‘It always turns out that much is salvageable.’

— John Ashbery (1927–2017)

Have you heard how we light up the houses  so they last forever, pyres of cardboard and joss  with laughter in the windows, late guests  dressed in their best clothes for a midnight ball  and all the old flames still dancing, long past  the hour? We cannot count the pairs (stacks of legal tender for a bank above, a paper chariot sent to speed the road ahead,  shoes without soles: what use are they to ghosts?… ) each one tossed across the chasm becoming its better, each translated without loss, salient as prayer I was a phantom for a day, you said and we believed you then, set our own spells to paper like fire so they would catch, would work with some new and unheard-of efficacy or even travel whole continents in a night as yours could, held aloft by the heat of their own significance, only to be visible a while from this world, from ours, but also from yours or whichever you resolved to inhabit then or (having gone yourself now where we cannot understand) might so alight or ever will and without end.

8

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