Extract: 'Tame'

It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.
 – CHINESE PROVERB

This is the tale of the woodsman’s daughter. Born with a box
              of ashes set beside the bed,
in case. Before the baby’s first cry, he rolled her face into the cinders –
              held it. Weak from the bloom
of too-much-blood, the new mother tried to stop his hand. He dragged
              her out into the yard, flogged her
with the usual branch. If it was magic in the wood, they never
              said, but she began to change:

her scar-ridged back, beneath his lashes, toughened to a rind; it split
              and crusted into bark. Her prone
knees dug in the sandy ground and rooted, questing for water,
              as her work-grained fingers lengthened
into twigs. The tree – a lychee – he continued to curse as if it
              were his wife – its useless, meagre
fruit. Meanwhile the girl survived. Feathered in greyish ash,
              her face tucked in, a little gosling.

He called her Mei Ming: No Name. She never learned to speak. Her life
              maimed by her father’s sorrow.
For grief is a powerful thing – even for objects never conceived.
              He should have dropped her down
the well. Then at least he could forget. Sometimes when he set
              to work, hefting up his axe
to watch the cleanness of its arc, she butted at his elbow – again,
              again – with her restive head,

till angry, he flapped her from him. But if these silent pleas had
              meaning, neither knew.
The child’s only comfort came from nestling under the
              lychee tree. Its shifting branches
whistled her wordless lullabies: the lychees with their watchful eyes,
              the wild geese crossing overhead.
The fruit, the geese. They marked her seasons. She didn’t long to join
              the birds, if longing implies

a will beyond the blindest instinct. Then one mid-autumn, she craned
              her neck so far to mark the geese
wheeling through the clouded hills – it kept on stretching – till
              it tapered in a beak. Her pink toes
sprouted webs and claws; her helpless arms found strength
              in wings. The goose daughter
soared to join the arrowed skein: kin linked by a single aim
              and tide, she knew their heading

and their need. They spent that year or more in flight, but where –
              across what sparkling tundral wastes –
I’ve not heard tell. Some say the fable ended there. But those
              who know the ways of wild geese
know too the obligation to return, to their first dwelling place. Let this
              suffice: late spring. A woodsman
snares a wild goose that spirals clean into his yard – almost like
              it knows. Gripping its sinewed neck

he presses it down into the block, cross-hewn from a lychee trunk.
              A single blow. Profit, loss.

Extract: 'A Painting'

I watched the turquoise pastel
melt between your fingerpads;
how later you flayed

the waxen surface back
to the sunflower patch
of a forethought, your

instrument an upturned
brush, flaked to the grain –
the fusty sugar paper buckled. 

You upended everything,
always careless of things:
finest sables splayed

under their own weight,
weeks forgotten – to emerge
gunged, from the silted

floor of a chemical jamjar.
I tidied, like a verger
or prefect, purging

with the stream from the oil-
fingered tap. Stop,
you said, printing

my elbow with a rusty index,
pointing past an ancient
meal’s craquelured dish

to the oyster-crust
at the edge of an unscraped palette –
chewy rainbow, blistered jewels.