"Not Yet"

by Amang

Translation and introduction by Steven Bradbury

Introduction

Born in Hualian, on the scenic eastern coast of Taiwan, Amang is the author of two volumes of verse, most recently, No Daddy (Beijing, 2008). The following poem is from her first collection—on/off (Taipei, 2003), which has the unique distinction of being bound in brown sandpaper—and is but one of a series of poems (or “field notes” as she prefers to call them) which explore the psychology and felt experience of that surprisingly under-theorized human behavior we call kissing. If every kiss (as Adam Phillips suggests in a provocative essay on the subject entitled “Plotting for Kisses”) is “a story in miniature, a subplot” containing traces of our personal history that simultaneously evince “the mouth’s extraordinarily versatility,” “Not Yet,” with its sensuous musicality, could be read as both a petite histoire of the anxious moments leading up to a kiss and as a dress rehearsal for the kiss itself.

Not Yet There is a kiss that still in transit stoops to gather up its bundle of effects the skirt caked with horseshit and slivers of broken glass the juices of a beetled spring flooding carp frolic among the lotus leaves this way and that allurement this way and that prints on a clavicle slipping through your fingers this way and that willow buds are bursting or else it’s just a pageant staged by this man on horseback approaching our luscious southern clime O these dark and silent types . . . the light fails my hands fall and I refuse to say yes this is my favorite carousel as well