Pusanweb Writing Contest 2002 - Fiction
 
Winter's Growth
  by Chris Weagle
November 19, 2002

I: February in Kajwa-Dong

Up the mountainside's sloping path
are stunted pines; the arms of others hold leaves,
curling brown, like squid curing on a line.
Smokestack smog streams in cold wind,
plumes like ink in water while music from a harmonica
squeezes out above me as it slides over the ridge top,
played by an old man in a cap wearing knee-highs
and knickers. I hear the voices of hikers from over
the summit, and their intonations become notes in a scale:
the third is the mother's concern over
the fifth, which is the wailing leg-scraped girl;
the seventh, her father's calming, carried
by the percussion of shoes on pebbles.
Inchon Bay down far below, past circuit boards of high-rise
apartments, offices and factories, transistor black and gray,
splashed with orange hot water tanks attached to roofs.
Freighters and tankers slide out of port, as slow as the sun
leaving its zenith. Cries from the nearby summits
echo through the gorge, swim along the ridges, untethered.
I feel that way, untied, staring at the seams
of Inchon streets tied tautly to mountain sides,
anchored on the borders of mountain range and harbor,
the strands of streets flung off across the rice plains
like spider webbing, whose silk becomes the glimmering
cars pulsing against roads and highways,
spreading like the branches of a tree in winter.


II: March Blues: Losing Face

To them, emotion is weakness;
though distrust to me is my defence,
a translucent disbelief that construes
my thoughts; but to them, it reveals
too many inner workings: soft muscle,
not pistons, not pulsating cylinders,
not circuit boards, but gesticulations,
aborted motions, thoughts better thought of,
creating lines to cross or not to cross.
My days now have time for one meal only,
and I'm over-worked by what the contract
didn't state, tired of communicating,
because every time it requires translation,
usually done poorly. My evenings
unwind in scotch vapours and the smell of smoke
through my clothes and walls. The ashtrays
are layered with water, so as to be more easily cleaned.
I watch cheap cigarettes drown in them,
water sucked into the butt as ashes
are recollected. At work we float by
each other daily, but the line drawn in
water is meaningless, disconnected
from intention, and frustration is an exposed
tendon. I colour the see-through emotions,
sketch something else, something less
organic, more machine-like.
That is all anyone really wants.


III: April with Kim Hyo-Sung

For forty minutes each early morning we drive
through what seems like Dr Eckleberg's wasteland,
to the generator repair plant where I teach
intermediate English lessons to a class
half-filled with beginners. Our time is of silence
and empty stretches; the simpler questions are all

recycled, for our grasp of each other's language
is too basic, and the day is far too early
to talk about much else than music and food.
Each winter day we drive past empty icy plains
that melt into fields filled with worker's backs bent
in the sowing and then reaping of radishes.
The silence between us I grow to understand

as less a want of common ground perhaps,
and more the lack of interest in small talk.
But in the two season's worth of words we share,
I watch seedlings grow, and value their beauty
in early drives through farmland in a country
where buildings are stacked-up sideways like cards in decks.

In Spring, cabbages and radishes begin to grow
on the fertile ground of tilled and tended landfill,
in topsoil as secretive as your thoughts can be,
hidden under your placid face, and as we grow
to shift less in our seats, I realize that those
earliest questions we've long since discarded
have become root beds of calm and quiet friendship.

 

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