Pride of Place: A series in which teaching staff and students from the English Department reflect on a place in Hong Kong. [Read all entries.] [Revisit the “Pet Sounds” series.] [Revisit the “Headspace” series.] [Revisit the “Ongoing” series.] [Revisit the “Interrogative” series.]

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Pride

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All watches in the house have stilled,
the air is heavy with reluctant rain.
My eldest daughter has nothing
to master time by.

I wonder if I will still be here
when she realizes
that time is a declination.
Calloused hands. A weakening grip.

A pixel or byte cannot lean, sway, or bend
toward myriad objects in motion.
Cannot yet render their joining.
Their pull, first together,
then apart.

She is my heroine, my champion.
This eleven-year-old
who owns my heart.
She, my proud Judith, will encircle evil,
wrest neutrality from its jaws.

She will gaze steadily
at how eternity always passes,
dripping into bowls.
Reckoning, recalling
her father’s fierce love
—his defiance—
that telling time is merely telling.
The decapitation of a nothing.

❀

I pass shops named Japan City—
choking on plastics—and Packed Place.
(No warranty, no mood.)

I am defeated. And sweating, now,
just as the clouds break.

Then spy, at last, the sih fu’s
regular spot below
the old tin street sign.

Where he has sat in all weathers,
fixing watches.
Since before clocks blinked.
He has gone home for the day.
His stool retracted against the wet.

I stand rooted, aghast,
marveling at this shrine,
this pride of place.
Neither blood nor soil.

An oracle, I see him tomorrow
as if it were yesterday:
His fluttering hands, coaxing,
whispering to the stilled thing
in his fingers.

It shudders then awakens,
encircling my daughter’s wrist
like a twisting vine.

Her smile.

She raises her umbrella
to the sky.

Pivots.

And rounds
the corner beyond my sight.