Tea Ceremony: Hangzhou

for Shiao Wei

After twenty years, my mislaid past
falls unexpected from a book.
The photo of you says it all: still lovely,
self-possessed and elegantly young.

Upmarket Comes Expensive

French-kissing over their cappuccinos
outside the corner café, two pierced,
tattooed and shaven-headed girls intent
on one another don’t notice the dog
rub mangy flanks hard against a piss-stained,
concrete wall to ease the itch, then shake off
pain and trot across to sniff their boot soles
one by one from underneath the table.

Three floors above, labourers shovelling
broken brick and plaster into a long,
blue chute dangling like plastic intestine
down the front of a gutted tenement
stop to have a laugh, enjoy the show, spit
out the dirty taste of dust and decay.

*
My children were all born in this bedroom,
there were no maternity hospitals
then, and it was here I nursed my husband
till he died. We laid him out on our bed
the best we could while the men went looking
for a doctor who’d come in the middle
of the night. I don’t know what I’d have done
without such good neighbours. That’s how it was
in those days, we stuck together because
we had to. It would be easier for me
now, though, to go into a home. No more
stairs to manage, no shopping to carry,
kinder to my legs. But I won’t. A bit
more pain’s not going to hurt at my age.

Compliance

Your turn’s coming, you can see it ahead,
at the other end of the line of cars
stalled by the barrier in driving rain
while troops in hooded capes the same drab green
as the bush slosh through potholes of rust-red
laterite run-off and point their guns
at the driver next in line for the slow
once-over, the cold-eyed document check.

Peering in through your rolled-down windows,
they silence the world with question marks:
will they let you go? Back-seat passengers
stay silent. You’re waved towards barbed-wire
fencing, a red-and-white-checked metal gate,
heavy machine-guns mounted on tripods
under cover in the backs of jeeps.
A soldier ticks his clipboard, signals you

on, grins as you pull obediently
away and the gate drops back into place.
No one puts his foot down, you drive slowly,
line astern, like undertakers, mindful
of frailty and watchful of the road.
The saturated green landscape melts by
outside, leaves you hungry for tarmac, white
lines, the false security of road signs.