新诗旧诗

前一阵子拜了老师学写诗。老师每个星期布置一些阅读，让根据阅读写一首作业。一开始还觉得挺有意思的，后来老师介绍当代诗，我越听越玄乎，不光交不出作业，连写诗的兴致也没有了。

贴几首前一段兴致还高的时候写的，求指正。

The pet store

I stand in front of the pet store
the one with yellow signs and blue revolving doors
Through tinted windows I see fish tanks
lined against the walls. Kois, arowanas and tropical fish
in lighted heaven of plastic grass
I hear water filters hum

Bird cages hang from the ceiling
Steel-wired, bone white, scallop roofs
with scrollwork trims, all draped in black silk
In the fake satin night
linnets and canaries dream on resin perches

Young girls walk through the doors
Some turn into long-haired puppies, some
exotic-looking cats
I linger on the sidewalk for I don't remember how long
I watch the day light die down

Around the corner someone is playing Debussy
I tap my crystal slippers
but I can not do the pirouettes
I fall down and in the street light
I break into pieces

I linger outside the pet store
The one with a neon sign that says
"Open 24 Hours"
In the distance the clock strikes twelve
I take a step towards the blue revolving doors

Deep Time
They began working on the clock of the long now
when I still tried to comprehend the sense of time
How ten years was like yesterday
How three weeks was in fact a life time

My three-year-old burst into tears when I said "later"
As later meant next year to her
"It's so long," she complained, "it's forever!"

That night I sat by the river waiting for you
The stench numbed my senses
The darkness freezed my tongue
There was an empty bottle on my table
with a card that said, "Thank you for the wine and the poems."
I would never again see the girl who left the note
until half a life-time later
She found me on Facebook
She never mentioned my poems
She never mentioned you

That night I was thinking about what they said
about the Omega Glory
And the blue bird
And the mulberry trees
When you looked at me in the eyes and said "never"
If I had any doubts before, now I have none

Did you hear the bells strike at midnight
Did you see me running away in deep time?

An Elergy
The girls are playing Kinect
The game of Peter Pan
The four-year-old and the seven
Flying the imaginary flight
Fighting the imaginary Captain Hook
with the imaginary swords

I sit beside them
trying to come up with great lines of poetry
to sing praise to beauty or to lament
to chew on Rilke
as you take Rilke differently from Neruda
For Neruda
You inhale

Once I was in love with Rilke
Back in the days when I fell in love so easily
with anything that had a purple hue
A dried flower of violet
A distant note of lavender
And the tinted glasses of an Austrian blond
But I got as far as half of Grade 1 German
Before I was caught by Neruda's volcanic lines
his laval rhymes
and the ruins beneath the ashes

You see, I took Neruda differently from Rilke
I breathed in Neruda
Until I choked with grief
But they tasted the same

Now I look at my children
Beautiful children they are
People often stop us on the street
Just to tell me what I always know
Or do I always know
as I watch the girls playing video games
while their brother reads Hardy Boys

Espresso or Tea

In a winter evening, I trekked down this path
The moon hid behind the birches
The wind cleansed the air
I followed the scent of the burning wood
and searched every doorway
I could not find the memories lost
The ones squandered inadvertently
like spilling a cup of coffee

I once lost a friend to carbon monoxide
taking her own life when recovering from a breakdown
I barely remembered her funeral
aside from the poem on a giant wreath:
“The angel must regret
to have stolen your wings.
The blue ocean,
The blue sky,
And broken hearts every night.”

I lost many friends since
but they were still alive
None had turned into angels
All had coffee stains
or was that tea?

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