Autumn Comes Around
Its light refracts on the mirror,
the table where a sprig of mint rests,
the photograph of my son, what was.
To be waiting, counting days, to renew
effort, to hear absent voices, to the wind
that’s there.
Time shuffles its endless doors, today
a holding pattern, white afternoon,
two shots of rum.
The wall is trying to have memories,
bloom of skid marks under paint,
the weeping it will not do.
To be ready with a suitcase,
to listen as your name is being called,
to go very far, farther than
every arrival and departure,
in autumn’s scarred days,
in autumn.
.
Till Night, till Morning
The night was fretful, but the morning was soft as cream.
Whoever wrestled with me in my dream has retreated
like the sleepy dragon in a Ming bowl.
Holiday catalogues arrive. Among clothing and furniture
there is one called The Final Plan.
Everyday someone tells you the earth
will burn up in six billion years.
In a documentary on Mongolia it is customary
to stop and greet the other traveler
you meet on the steppe.
Is the horse healthy?
Saddle in place?
Can I help?
The daycare where I walk by, the one
with a bright red buggy outside
is called Rock and Roll.
I can no longer tell the color of grief.
When the universe collapses I want to be
in a snowed-in pub where strangers
tell each other whether it has been worth it.
A man is lost
though he asks for directions.
Maybe he has been given too much
or not enough, either way he’s circling
like tourists in the middle of Manhattan.
He’s not the only one.
I’m there, too, twirling.
When asked about the afterlife Confucius replied,
how would I know when I’m ignorant about this life?
Nowhere is a city without a border. Suddenly you are in deep,
like bees in the Gobi desert.
The inspector says the house has faulty wiring
and must be fixed at once.
The doctor says this is no blood,
just ketchup.
I gulp a glass of water in the half-lit hour.
Life goes on. The century-old tram chugs along,
taking aging passengers to the end of the line.
When they get there it is night.
The water calm as a friary.
Light gleams from the other bank.
.
Pui Ying Wong is the author of Fanling In October (Barrow Street Press, 2023) as well as three other poetry collections: The Feast, An Emigrant’s Winter, and Yellow Plum Season along with two chapbooks: Sonnet For a New Country, and Mementos. She has received a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Chicago Quarterly Review, New Letters, Zone 3, and others. Born in Hong Kong she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 