RENDANG. Will Harris

      power, I make out the tin

      shacks, the stalls selling juices,

      the red-tiled colonial

      barracks, the new mall.

      It is raining profusely.

      After years of her urging

      me to go, me holding back,

      I have no more excuses.

      State-Building

      Break a vase, says Derek Walcott, and the love

       that reassembles the fragments will be stronger than

      that love which took its symmetry for granted.

      When I read this, I can only think who broke it?

      In the British Museum, two black ‘figures’

      (they don’t say slaves) beat olives from a tree;

      a ‘naked youth’ stoops to gather the fallen

      fruit. The freeborn men elsewhere, safe behind

      their porticos, argue about the world’s

      true form, or talk of bee glue, used

      to seal the hive against attack, later called

      propolis, meaning that it has to come

      before – is crucial for – the building of a state.

      *

      Here it’s summer and bees groan inside

      the carcass of a split bin bag. A figure passes,

      is close to passed, when I see her face, half

      shadow, marked with sweat or tears, the folds

      beneath each downcast eye the same light

      brown as – oceans off – my grandma. Mak.

      Give me a love that’s unassimilated, sharp

      as broken pots. That can’t be taken; granted.

      My dad would work among the blue and white

      pieces of a Ming vase – his job to get it

      passable. He’d gather every bit and after days

      assembling, filling in (putty, spit, glue),

      draw forth – not sweetness – something new.

      Lines of Flight

       Mariinsky Canal

      A girl twists a stalk of rye

      around her wrist like

      a bracelet. She sees her father

      at the plough and wants

      to pick a cornflower, its dark

      blue almost purple

      colour threaded through

      with grief, among the weeds.

      She wants to go and pin

      one to his chest. And all this

      is implied, though

      the photograph itself

      shows just a field of rye

      with cornflowers.

       Diyarbakır

      One day, a white rabbit read

      my fortune, twitching as it chose

      from several slips of paper, soft head

      straining at its harness, nose

      scabbed, peeled back like bark.

      Here, amid the desert, stark

      as day, they tortured dissidents;

      now paper slips blow between

      the points of a barbed wire fence.

      A life should not just be, but mean.

       Illinois

      The familiar, unearthly

      scent of Bayside Breeze.

      On the freeway, bent

      along its axis, I do

      as ghosts do: wait.

      Acres of still corn.

      Slow-smelling night.

      Across the ocean

      he lies in hospital.

      He might as well be

      dead. This far from

      the side of any bay,

      I measure sweetness

      by its incongruity.

       London

      A shuttle flies between

      the seasons, smoothest

      from spring to summer

      when I think of my Chinese

      forebears forced to work

      a loom. Who’d be alone

      today? Migratory birds are

      weaving new patterns

      in the air, shuttles flying

      back and forth. Here. No,

      there. I’ve been missing you.

      My Name Is Dai

      I heard him say his name was die, and seconds later that it was short for

      David, spelt D-A-I. We had just sat down when he walked up to me

      and Susie. He said he recognized her from the National Portrait Gallery.

      The one with the large forehead above the door. People miss it. The sad

      smile. Beer sloshed against the edges of his glass like a fish trying to

      escape its bowl, but in this case the fish was dead and only looked to be

      alive because of Dai’s swaying. There are people who relieve themselves

      of information like a dog pissing against a streetlamp to mark out

      territory, urination no longer in the service of the body, providing no

      relief. Likewise, conversation. Dai was a type of Ancient Mariner.

      It was in his bones. He’d been working on a site with Polish builders

      and it was one of their birthdays. He mimed plunking bottles on the table.

      Vodka. Whole bottles? I’m Welsh, he said. I was born on a mountain.

      Between two sheepdogs. He started talking about the village he grew up

      in, how happy he was among the meadows and milking cows, how

      unhappy he was at school. You might’ve heard of one boy from school.

       A right goody. Spoke like Audrey Hepburn or Shakespeare. We all bullied

       him, but my mam would say why don’t you be like Michael, why don’t you

       be like Michael. Michael bloody Sheen. Michael’s shirts were always