Ouyang Jianghe

Where the immemorial and the instant meet, opening and distance appear. Through the opening: a door, crack of light. Behind the door, a kitchen. Where the knife rises and falls, clouds gather, disperse. A lightspeed joining of life and death, cut in two: halves of a sun, of slowness. Halves of a turnip. A mother in the kitchen, a lifetime of cuts. A cabbage cut into mountains and rivers, a fish, cut along its leaping curves, laid on the table still yearning for the pond. Summer’s tofu cut into premonitions of snow. A potato listens to the onion-counterpoint of the knife, dropping petals at its strokes: self and thing, halves of nothing at the center of time. Where gone and here meet, the knife rises, falls. But this mother is not holding a knife. What she has been given is not a knife but a few fallen leaves. The fish leaps over the blade from the sea to the stars. The table is in the sky now, the market has been crammed into the refrigerator, and she cannot open cold time.

What a thing it would be, if we all could fly. But to rise on air does not make you a bird. I’m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles. It’s spring, and everyone’s got something to puke. The things we puke: flights of stairs, a skyscraper soaring from the gut, the bills blow by on the April breeze followed by flurries of razor blades in May. It’s true, a free life is made of words. You can crumple it, toss it in the trash, or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining a permanent address in the sky. The postman hands you your flight of birds persisting in the original shape of wind. Whether they’re winging toward the scissors’ V or printed and plastered on every wall or bound and trussed, bamboo frames wound with wire or sentenced to death by fire you are, first and always, ash. Broken wire, a hurricane at each end. Fire trucks scream across the earth. But this blaze is a thing of the air. Raise your glass higher, toss it up and away. Few know this kind of dizzy glee: an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.