Winter Night & Other Poems
By Pui Ying Wong
WINTER NIGHT
Wind picks up at midnight and puts
a shrill on our window.
The last walker and his dog
disappear quickly like specters.
Televisions replaying the president’s
speech begin to dim, an afterglow
metastasized on the dark screens.
Thaw is nowhere,
the republic paralyzed like captives
in holding cells awaiting trials.
We doubt the almanac,
the misalignment of planets and stars.
We search history books but
they blow dust back at us.
A MORNING POEM
In a gothic-style writer’s room
where I was a guest for a short stay,
there was nothing on the desk
other than an antiquated table lamp
and a rock the size of a fist.
And with a slightly flat body
and one pointy side it looked to me
like a miniature spaceship.
Rust-flecked and on its heels
it sat as a silent witness.
Outside, early morning fog
rolled past, dew gathered
in the grass, hush,
an occasional rumbling
of a distant train.
MOUNT SAN ANGELO
The hurricane misses it by twenty inches
of rain, but a slope of pussy willows
get batted down.
Hidden from the road there is a scattering
of koi, safe in the pond, swimming
back and forth,
scarlet and gold.
Out on a walk from the hill we see
the residence, home for now.
Inside, artists are at work.
Come, my wayward muse,
untangle from your favorite
mummy suit.
This is the sound of fall. We must hurry.
Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry: An Emigrant’s Winter (Glass Lyre Press, 2016) and Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010)—along with two chapbooks. She has won a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume Poetry, New Letters, Zone 3 and The New York Times, among others. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.