for Guo
Two red paper fish swim twenty meters high
in a chilly late afternoon breeze, their yellow scales
flickering like a star's flame. It's Christmas day
in other worlds; it's an easy wind for two boys
flying kites on an uncrowded Tiananmen Square.
We stop to watch the kites and you smile and say
when you were a boy you'd come here to play
on hot summer days, hoping to find
the open square cooler than the hu tong,
the narrow lane that was home to you and
fourteen hundred others, three kilometers south.
Thirty meters east the Chinese Museum of Revolution's
giant clock flashes yellow numbers, counting down
the days, hours, minutes, and seconds to July 1, 1997,
and the British handover of Hong Kong.
"Mr. Parsons, do you know about June 3, 1989?" you
ask.
You'd walked to Wangfujing Street the previous evening
to buy a pair of pants for work but found the stores' doors closed.
Soldiers said, "Go home."
You walked to the square's edge and found the crowd swelling,
a truck blazing, helicopters swarming fifty meters high.
Soldiers said, "Go home."
The "heat" made you nervous, so you went home.
The next morning the tanks came.
We take a shortcut from Chang An Street to Wangfujing
through China Lane, the hu tong where you shared
a room with three men for six years as a young engineer
for the China Textile Machinery Company.
Turning into the lane, our path is blocked -
a worker is shoveling dirt and rock into a truck bed.
Another man speaks, the shoveler stops,
steps aside, and we move on.
"What did he say?" I ask.
"Stop that. Let our foreign friend pass."
Further on, giant black crows caw like crazy
in naked white poplars. "Do you know what they say?
Please stay, Mr. Parsons, please stay," you call out in bird
voice.
Minutes later, you point to a diner's dim red lights
and say they serve the food of Mao's hometown -
too hot for your taste. You quickly point again and say,
"An important man lives behind that gate,
maybe a government or military official.
There's a garage; he's got a car, so he is an important man."
You say your dream is to own a car one day.
When we walk out of the hu tong onto a sidewalk, you bow
and raise a palm. "We have arrived - Wangfujing."
Flashes of red neon shop signs and amber streetlights
wash the hu tong's shadows from your face.
Yes, Guo, we have arrived .
And we have opened a simple gift between us
in our journey through the open square and the narrow lane.
And so I offer you a wish:
May all your journeys begin from here,
in the here and now, just like now,
beaming, as if in a magic lantern's clear light,
or like a kid waking at Christmas in my part of the world -
Wide-eyed and all smiles.
