Uncle Sum

Uncle Sum Within and without his unreal estate of mind, Uncle Sum was once beaten to silliness, his face deeply cut in the shape of a sickle, with which I harvested rice as a truant little boy in Nan On Village outskirts in the autumn rice paddies. Locusts will not wait. In the Canton flat, Uncle would sit in deep silence before walking and kicking his leg into the thin air. It was summer and the sunshine was honey on the black tar of the streets. Here he is pushed into the bamboo armchair because of a bad leg. Later we knew it was diabetes. He told me never to play shallow, yet deep waters contain fish they cannot leave. Such is the oppression of the natural world. Kafka’s father, another Kafka, had sentenced his son to death by drowning. Uncle Sum later lived on Chek Kai Island off the coast of Guangdong Province, which was abstemious enough not on any map. He stared half a day into the ocean. This considerably enlarged his mind – the unreal estate of poetry.