THUYEN, Nha

…..
i look at many eyes that are not his eyes

i look at stars looking whimsically aslant at me from afar

a dissolving presence, two deserted houses, enclosed in wind, scattered in wind, beset by wind

and i without happiness like night, i with happiness like night, i a clown in a tragic play of darkness

…..


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"gifts"

in the afternoon, while waiting for trains to come and leave, we’d sit opposite one another, so one could not see the other

we displayed our lives there, the games of small children, each one understanding that other person in their own way and i, in the end still know nothing about him

i heard the broken rattling of ideas in his head, we stuck out tongues to lick the stream of pale dream light

an afternoon’s noise sunk at the station as the train shuddered on its rails, a deaf person gave me a hairpin which i dropped at some point

I extract him from me, bit by bit, the smell of stagnant rainwater, a stain on the face, strands of hair shed on my coat’s shoulder, the bra strap exposed, his tickling fingers on me, an old man selling tea on the street slowly discarding the spoiled longans

I told him goodbye but forgot to say thank you, the blind spot of my fate that in a moment doesn’t know itself

for years now, I have forgotten the old games somewhere, out of laziness, i don’t know anything more about him, only sometimes in a way, i eat the pieces of memory, silently, slowly, always hungry, until he disappears, what i imagined about anguish, was only silence in the end

until i am suddenly kissing him in a dream, what i imagined was silence, an enduring resonance like the corpse-dry broom of a haggard street sweeper