The Young Biologists

By Kate Rogers:

They are in Hong Kong
four days only,
found my hiking group online.
They are surprised
by the highland city-state,
its emerald cleavage
of valleys,
swaying stands of bamboo.
Meiying—small, eyes soap-stone grey—
tells me,
Mother is Chinese. I’ve never met my father—
some garden variety white guy—
in Asia long enough
to find love.

Boyfriend Bogdan
is six feet—twice Meiying’s height.
Born in Russia. Straw
blond. Silent.
Both American now.
At Harvard.
I admire their confidence, their curiosity
about spiders the same breadth
as Bogdan’s hand.
He crouches so she can
straddle his shoulders
to snap a close-up
of the spider’s silk mandala.

Swallows stoop low
over the dirt trail,
sipping mosquitoes.
I stutter to Meiying
in seldom used Mandarin,
Yenzi lai li [i]
The Swallows Return.
She smiles.

At a village of tin shacks
we stop for bowls of Tofu-fa
with ginger syrup. The tofu quivers
like soft-boiled egg white
on our bone china spoons.
The server shuffles like my mother,
dowager’s hump heavy
on her slight frame.
She points to green fingered bananas
on a weathered plank table.
Meiying buys one.

Back on the tree-shaded trail
Meiying and Bogdan spot
katydid uniquely spiked
and caterpillars blushing pink
in the middle
like ripening watermelons.
The Young Biologists
hope to identify a new species.
I list British colonial names
from my guide, Hong Kong Butterflies:
Paris Peacock, Chocolate Pansy,
Painted Lady.
Meiying and Bogdan laugh.

I scoop a butterfly I do not recognise
from a leaf in the teeth of the wind.
Hold its ragged wings
in a loose fist.
The butterfly tickles my palm
(sipping sweat?)
I glimpse scattered cells
of blue light.

Hiking, my hips rotate
in sockets brittle as fossil insects
suspended mid-leap in sap,
shellacked. I spy a two-legged stick-
insect limping like a pilgrim
across the hard mud trail.
Meiying and Bogdan each take a photo
of it teetering on Meiying’s palm.
We emerge from trees
to asphalt path. Our pace slows.
The blue butterfly
flutters on my palm—
lover’s eyelashes against my skin.
We trade nature tales:
I recall a leopard cat—
wild feline that fixed me in its amber gaze,
sleek as it paddled a marsh pond.
Meiying recounts the torpor
of a hibernating hummingbird
huddled in the barbed
mouth of a Mojave cactus.
We do not wish to part,
standing near the steps
into the train tunnel.
The ground trembles, a train
clanks onto the tracks.
I show them—in the cage of my fingers—
the torn blue butterfly.
They nod. I open my hand.

About the poet:
Kate Rogers was shortlisted for the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. She has work forthcoming in Catherines, the Great (Oolichan). Her poems have appeared in Twin Cities Cinema (Hong Kong-Singapore); Juniper; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal; The Guardian; Asia Literary Review and other publications. Out of Place, Kate’s latest poetry collection, is reviewed here.

[i] Literal: the swallows return. Idiomatic: Spring is back.