Page 15 (1/2)

Hsin Wake up It is tio to work

Work? Watching paper dissolve to dirt? Watching spectacles rust? The coal is gone; there is nothing to dredge up Why don’t we go down to the east wall and watch the tide strangle the shore?

Hsin If you do not get up you will be punished You are assigned to the sea-shaft today—that’s twelve bridges across the roofs and all those stairs, all those stairs down to the mine mouth And there is rain

Xiao, pretty sparroife, ill punish one, there are only the quiet terh banisters, and they do not care if we are tardy

Please, please wake up I am tired too, my bones are full of black too, , but I anment We must make the best of it

No I won’t go back there, not there

The air disturbs needle-leaved weeds—there is green on Gunkanjiardens Caterpillars wriggle in its gutters; out of its stone lips sprout loud reenery—the air , sees only the splintered staircases winding down past their own shadows So jaw—a shaft sunk deep below the sea, a shaft that voe and bile and bodies

The air does not want to go down into it

It never dug those ant tracks through the basalt, but Chen and Zhao did, Chen and Zhao whothe soot from their faces, Chen and Zhao who told endless jokes about the carpenter and his angry hauttered, who filled their floor with hter Chen and Zhao—and Hsin, as never late, and whose breath smelled of sour plu the island like a brush, they all came back with damp shoulders, damp from that cool, wet tunnel where their palms turned black

The air does not want to go down Old voices coh broken stairs like ferns; ferns throw roots down through broken stairs like voices—the air sits down heavily and puts its head in its hands

Hsin, it’s dark The wind—

Tastes like metal, yes It’s always dark in the lower levels—the towers eat the sun Coae and the old rain and the rusted pipes

It’s dark, dark like the inside of a bone Why do I wake up here, Hsin, with a drainage grate for my pillo

w? The bars, the bars in my flesh—