鵷鶵 / A Flying Martlet
Eiffel Gao
<<< Bill Bryson Library, Durham
Grind Black Ochre with water
And write on clay with its colourless paint.
One day, when scorched with fierce fire
Whatever you wrote
will in tender blue appear.
Can some ancient artisan
Prove to me this gibberish?
<<< Ninghai, Ningbo
Twenty miles of red dowry
A port tread by red coats
Eight years under the Red Army
But enough.
I know only a magnolia tree.
On a glaring afternoon,
One of its enormous flowers fell.
A light thud.
Then another.
No more came down until I smelt dinner.
Tiny insects, like moving dots of ink
Still laboured on its thick ivory petals
Which fell apart and scampered further
And rolled in dust.
<<< Heathrow Observation Deck
The deep ocean toiled above
Drawn back by the sunset, lamps glittered like sand
Aeroplanes shot up one by one,
Like lonesome grunions,
But sounded like passing whales
who had pardoned their huntsmen.
<<< A Map in the British Library, London
Men have drowned on the outline of her inner thighs.
Each strand of her sable hair
Has bridled a thousand armies.
She makes mooncakes with sunflower seeds
Lotus lanterns that burnt on West Lake.
One of her long sleeves tolls the dessert bells on the Silk Road
the other brims with fishermen’s songs.
She never greets her people.
Where, she once wondered, did they pick up those odd tongues?
She watches them labour and leave,
then grows drowsy with the incurable tenderness for fleeting things.
<<< A House in a Green Suburb of Shanghai
‘You talk like a different person
when I’m picking out your white hair.’
Your nape: your ebony hairline meeting your flesh
The dazzling field: the cloud scuttered away with a kiss and a shade.
I’ll turn into an albino phoenix and flush my ashes.
You should be a hermit thrush and marry my grave.
Ask me what moves me most in the world. Ask me
and I’ll tell you a long tale about two who parted for divergent journeys:
Undone by different seas, moulded over with age and weather,
they recognised each other, on their weary way back.
<<< River Wear, Durham
How could I recall what I have never forgotten
How to imagine this is the same moon
How much I missed, how many more sighs
Why, since when, by what means and wherefrom
Have all the sodden questions been
Tautened
Homeward.
<<< 鵷鶵 & Martlet
She descends from the phoenix
Never alights except on Chinese parasol trees
Eats nothing but the centurial seeds of bamboo
Drinks only from sweet wellsprings
From the South Sea to the North Sea she flies:
She heard about a footless bird called Martlet
She will fly to see Martlet and say,
I, perhaps, share your affliction.
But tell me, my patient reader,
Are there any Chinese parasol trees?
~
Eiffel Gao was born in the summer of 1994; her hometown is a town called Ninghai, in Ningbo, China. She studied English, Classics and History of Art at Durham University, and will continue to do an MA on creative writing there. She started writing English poems in her final year, taking the module Creative Writing Poetry. Much she owes to her overseas experience, and much more still to her native tongue. She dislikes stereotypes and wishes to create a space where the Occident and the Orient (if we may use these abstract concepts loosely) can sit down and converse, finally and properly.
Éphémère is a concept; two visions of the same sphere. Both are multidisciplinary Mauritian artists—designers and illustrators—influenced by nature and culture. They attempt to convey a part of their dream-like, somewhat playful world through their art and products. (Photo credits: Céliliphotographies)
