Poems by Ling Ye
Descent
Light strikes the eye’s pupils—contraction
Striking pain in the pinprick fore of the head
Like lightning colliding with a tree
Turning it charred
Black
Onomatopoeia
Of colors—surging red rushing thunderous dome
Boom booming of heart drum in ear caverns
Angry welts of purple green vision
Red hot rage fizzing soda pop
Vibrating buzz of internal machine like
angry hornets’ nest dropped on concrete
The sour taste of yellow on the flesh
As lovers peel off each other
Slicked sweat and sultry
The piercing A-sharp scream of cat
Shaking earthquake vibrations
Through bones and up spine, unsteady
Juddering arm joints, quaking finger sticks
Thunderous crash of bullet leaving barrel
Spouse / partner / husband / wife
No silencer—ringing alarms in ear domes
Crimson ricochets off the walls and the
White white sheets splattered
Entrails like roadkill sick
Swimming vision fading orange green blue navy
Blackness
Gentle kiss of glowing gold on lids of optical receptors
Tight hug from belted arms white wrapped about
Cold body
Of ghost, whiteness like clouds, ephemeral mist
Lightness of body floating floating
Into ozone
Blissed nap in padded box, dessert pills of happy woozy
Love love love
Comfort and hazy drawing closed curtains of gray dark
Coming through the other side of shadow
This descent into madness
Stella '17 or A Straight Line is Not That Simple
These high piles of snow lining the sides of the streets
has me walking on the straight and narrow,
starting and ending at the crosswalks,
waiting for the lights, and looking out for cars,
like you’re supposed to;
no more short cuts between parked cars,
no more jaywalking in the middle of the street,
no more detours through driveways and bike lanes...
I'm left with no other choice but to navigate
thin patches of concrete wide enough only for one person,
single-person meandering walkways,
negotiating with other unfortunate pedestrians
for that precious piece of clean sidewalk
through the white snow, packed snow, dirty snow,
navigating treacherously over brown slush
halfway through the crosswalk, only to be stopped
by a dark gray puddle of melted once-snow,
looking like the cold mush of nightmares,
that you need to leap over, run around, climb past
over the packed slick hills, or risk walking through it
(how deep is it, really?)
I always supposed the straight and narrow
to be the road of least resistance, but now that I realize
it is only full of hidden dangers and unexpected troubles,
I think I prefer my way of clever shortcuts and
shrewd calculations, risking known dangers and
making leaps of faith,
for you are not entirely blind when making your own way;
you are guided by life's experiences.
An Art to Holding On
I took a picture of the city
and the city disappeared
Memories fading into the rudimentary
colors of a four by six;
Framed and caged in a one-dimension
imitation of a genuine city
halfway around the world.
That last bite of coq au vin
Sticking to the tip of the tongue
Like a faded memory of desperate lust
That last glimpse of the Nile
a vision of awe and wonder and
reminiscent of bittersweet dreams
That last trek up the five hundred
and fifty-one steps of St. Peter’s
Basilica, sweaty regret giving way
to the profound sadness of loss and leaving.
What I wouldn’t give to hold onto
the truths I had acquired, the beauty
I had witnessed, the desperate feeling
of falling in love
with a strange city in a strange land;
That desire, that need, to remain where
one had only intended a visit.
I recorded the music of the city
and the music faded into the air,
Lyric voices lost to the sounds of silence
and replaced by the cacophony
of home, forever lost in
the distortion of memory.
I try to view my own city
through the eyes of a visitor,
But all I see is the leaning
Tower of Pisa, the striking point
of the Eiffel Tower, the sparkling
Waters of the Mediterranean,
The pink sands of the Bahamas beaches.
Why is it that we long for the places
we don’t inhabit, that we lust
for the cities, the countries
that don’t contain us;
A desire to be other than here and
dream of memories of foreign delights
tugging at our hearts and souls.
There is an art to holding onto beauty,
whether the beauty is
perceived or genuine,
and an art to letting it go, and we are
far more desperately practiced in
the holding on.
The End of the World Again
I have not come here to compare notes
but to sit together in the stillness
at the end of the world.
Yesterday I asked you if you remember
that time we went to see the dinosaur
at that museum we both liked
And you said to me,
“You mean the museum you like, and don’t you mean
the whale? It was the whale.”
I nodded in agreement but I know it was the
Dinosaur, the biggest creature that ever
walked the Earth, now extinct, now
re-made of petrified bones,
plaster and fiberglass, held together
by bits of steel and ingenuity,
Much like the world we live in, lived in,
made of the real and the fake,
the truth and that posing as truth.
A small army of billions built it
with love and hope and bits of genius
engineering, steel and grit,
blood, sweat, and tears, all the clichés that
We fall back on in times of
upheaval and profound change. And yet
the people keep on keeping on, forging a way
forward, pulling out of the sticky
mud mess that we had got ourselves into
in the first place.
And they always make it out, patching up wherever
possible, with tape and glue,
perseverance, pluck and mettle, with love.
And with the brilliance and smarts that creates
order from chaos. A fascinating interplay
of conflicting functions—
The kinds of mind and heart that is hard to come by
Nowadays.
We look at the bubble that holds the world,
sit and watch as the bubble is slowly collapsing
in, consuming itself, we sit
detached and waiting.
How are you feeling about all of this, you
with your big ideas and your glib tongue,
You with your poetry that is a witness to magnitude,
your profundity shaping meaning out of the epic
that is, was?, the life of the world,
Though the world was an accident,
its peoples an afterthought, formed
in the crevasses of dark/gray matter that
may have been the drunken mind of an All-being
but could just as well have been a fluke,
an odd fish in the salt sea of nonsense.
What do you think is the legacy of this life,
your wisdom in this moment of death
and potential rebirth?
Like the time we were at that party and
they were all harping on about that book,
pretentious opinions falling off lips
like water down a fall, rushing to the
bottom, sinking to the muddy deep, and you said something,
A riposte, that would have shut it all down
If not for that explosion at the same moment,
that had them running to the windows
to gape at the destruction of a truck and minivan,
Spectators of lives in ruination.
You didn’t say you wanted better, only
that you wanted more.
What did you mean?
No, don’t tell me.
I do not want to know.
I want to find out for myself
if there is a future.
I have not come to compare notes, or to listen
to you after all this time, I just
want to sit here, in silence,
in the stillness, and
to watch the end, and to hear a new beginning
rising out of the ashes of the end of the world,
again.
Ling Ye is a practicing attorney in New York specializing in immigration law. She is an aspiring writer who writes fiction and poetry in her spare time. She is a graduate of Bronx High Sschool of Science, St. John's University, and New York Law School. She is currently living in the Bronx, NY with her husband and her cat. Some of her writing can be viewed on her blog: LingYeJourneys.Blogspot.com.