A Meal of Meditation Not at the Zhongli Night Market
~ on the outskirts of Zhongli, Taiwan, 1994
Once a week I wind my way
with a vicious precision
through the spectacle of make-shift lights, tarped tents,
through waves of writhing miàntiáo stands
with their piping hot noodles laced with
shots of bok choy and white shallots,
to the sure swerve of the silver Teppanyaki counter
which is luminous itself, beneath the pure white moon,
on the outskirts of the shanty-like food town.
The cook is cold, grim,
performs his proficient gestures
never for me, nor for anyone else,
but alive to what shines in his knife,
a business man opening and closing files,
the work in each file compiling his life,
all glistening meat yielding abruptly to each rent.
Perhaps he, the knife set loose from its sheath
and their workings, are but one mechanism.
This man does not make food
or offer good omens,
certainly not some kind of affected show,
but he enacts the parable of enough —
his wife folded behind him into the dark,
bent and balanced on her gormless ankles.
What passes between them is bland,
sparse, spiceless talk
and things like bean sprouts, garlic,
cabbage, thinly sliced capsicum, spring onions.
And yet it is here I am drawn week after week,
not to the bustling purse and pulse of the Zhongli night market.
The family dog arrives, hovers, hobbles, slouches nearby like a spectre,
then weakens to waste beneath the table at which I quietly eat,
not begging, just resting near a serrated edge I can almost see
except for the night’s roiling up like a fog from the wet cold concrete,
less dog than what we wàiguó rén usually perceive,
but more creaturely, in a constant state of deprivation.
I could feed him, he who labours to breathe by my feet, or not,
but I can never give him enough,
so I never offer one scrap.
I lift each bite to the quick grip of my teeth.
* * * * * *
Gentrification
I’m sitting in my car in the old downtown,
watching a man who wears a red toque,
in my rear view mirror,
conceal something in his jacket.
He dashes across the tracks
just as the train approaches. A shopkeep
opens a door and looks to where the man was.
The train rumbles through the neighbourhood.
Abruptly the door is closed.
Across the road Roy Roy Roy
is painted over
every second-floor shuttered window
of the bankrupt brick furniture store,
creating a kind of bland art
pleasing in its spareness and symmetry,
if you stare hard enough.
“Modern,” if it were the 1960’s.
There are three ground floor windows.
In one, a fire extinguisher.
Another must have a leak as it,
despite the cold, is varnished, sweaty.
We simply sell for less in yellow paint
on orange, is broken up in part by two fans
that turn only when the air catches them.
Vegetarian fare and fair trade coffee shops,
a stripper’s club and the auxiliary
poorly heated apartments, ebb out from
Roy Roy Roy’s.
My son has just auditioned for art school.
He has been accepted.
A green shopping cart lies on its side
just off the sidewalk.
A real estate sign curls in the third ground floor
window touting 20,000+ square feet
of forsaken capitalist kingdom.
Who might they keep out of art school and why?