Teaching English in China
The old professor can’t help
The fact that his hair is turning grey

An email letter leaves him
Upset for days without knowing why
That begins with this: ‘Dear Mr professor Richard’

Student papers are written in such a way
That how much effort goes into fixing them
He invariably sees a new English cropping up postgraduateswise:

‘I felt boring when days after days were spent meaninglessly’
‘He doted him and he doted her’
‘Grandma cared me so much

Snow flecked with orange as if it fell from the sun.
A shambles of ripped branches.
The ground has grown lemons and bright hailstones.
Yellow wasps attack the cold air.

In two hours it will be summer again.
The yard and the year, will recover.
Here snow is never seasonable.
A deep freeze is what we fear.

The trees, so young, already yield a past:
We planted the lemon in sawdust and sand,
stray cat litterbox, the yard’s bad patch.
Iron nails rust at the roots of the lime

We tossed them high into the air
And caught them coming down,
Sliding straight through
The tips of our bayonets.
Babies cry in any case,
But the women, oh, the women,
They made such a racket;
Had to quieten them down:
That was more bayonet practice.

We had our instructions, we had to clear the place.
We got rid of the men first, one way or another.
As for the women, we did our manly thing with them first,
Anywhere, behind doorways, in the middle of the streets,
Anytime,

On clear days, Hong Kong is a white line
of mushrooms rising straight-stemmed brown-rimmed
on a scrap of blue that skirts the long bridge.

Yesterday, it was a bank of dark clouds
glowing red with three days of rain
towering over cities on both sides

to remind every living thing in them
how small we are, how little we know
of a water planet we inhabit

like insects on a dry leaf
floating on the surface of a pond.

This poem first appeared in Issue 5 (Nov. 2008) of Cha

I meant to write something that said,
Yes, I know what you mean.

Your father sitting there, dark and broad,
like the old rock at the riverfront by my house.
The deliberate crossing of his legs,
his spectacles balanced on a hard bridge,
a left elbow digging into the cushioned arm.

He’s been keeping a shadow in his shirt pocket.

Your painting:
I think chiselled stone.
I think a firm no.
I think of my father’s straight gaze
out the living room window,
cutting off the