Rooftop shingles

concatenate across the valley like fractal canopy,

like RGB pixels blooming

over the dusky night. In one rendering

of my memory, Taipei is a city stalled

on the threshold of morning,

recursive function paused

on the nth iteration of the scripting

of this city that I love, suspended

until the day of my return. In another,

Grandpa joins me on the balcony

at five a.m., points out each silhouetted sight

as the city blinks into being.

 

On Grandpa’s eightieth birthday,

I Skype him from my dorm. It’s so easy

to cast Grandpa as immutable constant

in the relentless loop of time,    

Grandpa, preserved by static screen,

Grandpa, whose face looks ageless

in a certain light—it’s so easy

to pose for the camera, look a screen

in the eye, make out a smile

in the mass of pixels, flickering and bright—

so easy to blame my clumsy tongue

on bad audio, faulty connection.

 

Grandpa once told me that

distance resolves chaos into a kind of harmony

and I think of the cluttered streets

of my childhood, gorgeous

only from afar, and all the words

I forsook in the ether between then

and now, and the cracked-shell facade

of my Mandarin, obscured

by the crackle of the phone, think of

all the distance between us  

and the way I can only bear to love him

when we’re an ocean apart.

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