Lychee Tree and the Other Woman

 

Sorry to the second concubine craving the fruit

On a pregnant Guangzhou lychee tree.

First wife crying, her runny eyes, her creased unlucky palm lines,

Picking lychees for the younger woman.

Brown old leaf not chlorophyll green in her youth, breathing naively,

Hanging like suicide on his jagged branch, nervous of neglect,

A woman’s old age dipping to the ground, useless to the Emperor tree.

 

How invasive flirty honeybees are, poking their busybody mouths into

The Emperor’s rotten lychees, old, yet still tempting.

Jealous mottled moth flutters, trembles her parting wings.

To be one of the leaves on the Emperor’s lychee tree

And not to be a woman.

What’s the difference?

Suffering for his attention, she is the leaf shrinking to the ground,

Drying up his ancient memory

As a tantalising new leaf materialises.

 

Sorry to the second concubine, for a third concubine will take your place.

A green chrysalis opening up, upstaging the leaves.

All leaves anticipate the other lovely woman,

Wait for this banded peacock butterfly

To emerge with giant green wingspans, seducing your Emperor,

Flaunting her six needle legs in his tree, summoning old leaves

To shake lychees into a basket for her.

Four wings doubling to eight monarch wings.

Interlacing. Quaking his twigs.

Seducing his brown bark as his sap drips

Leisurely to the yellow grass.

Leaves cannot speak, but still the first leaf senses,

Says nothing about the other woman, and the others that will follow her.

 

 

A Man Kissing a Woman Kissing Honey

 

Mama, how does it feel to love a man while living inside a moon?

I cried against a lemon tree whose leaves whistled like father did

nibbling a yellow egg yolk inside a mooncake,

lost in thought about the heart of a lonesome moon-goddess.

Papa, a woodcutter destined never to chop down his cassia tree,

a rabbit’s medicine unable to heal the fever of my night-time loneliness.

Mama, did you know I have never loved a man before?

I feel him every mid-autumn when he cries over a caged butterfly

whose legs moved like mother did when father kissed her upside down.

Breaking this myth with the woodcutter’s axe in his hand,

I watch through a moon’s crater how he fingers the rosebuds of her wings.

She becomes a butterfly suffering through the moon’s metamorphoses.

A moon-goddess does not know how it feels to love a man.

I can taste him on my tongue as I bite into his golden lemon hanging

on an eternal tree impossible for an enchanted axe to chop down.

His voice echoes pass mythic meteoroids and colliding comets in space

hollering that kissing me is a man kissing a woman kissing honey

From a butterfly’s deathless lips.

Inhaling the perfume of his caged butterfly fluttering free

to the surface of the harvest moon, a lantern tucked between her legs,

he pledges to Cassiopeia the rescue of a lonely woman, a rabbit, and a woodcutter

trapped tragically inside a full moon.

Mama, did you know I want to fall in love with a man?

He collapses ladder after ladder climbing the night, but can’t save me.

I’m a broken butterfly not liberated to love.

By morning, vanishing behind the gloom of the sun, the moon does not exist.

I belong inside a myth. He belongs inside a reality.

Mama, I know how it feels to love a man while living inside a moon.