JAY GAO

The Pessoa from Macau: Palsy

Military rigour. Rearranging a vase of scarlet snapdragons. Breaks water. To steady herself, she flattens their stems in her palms. Against the marble table. In the little hour. Fourth-floor apartment. The piano was always a loyal sentinel. From the balcony, across the square, her husband’s favourite. Past time. House of opera. All year. Frustrated technicians whipped the wood panelling in order to get it to behave. Its corners and shadows were to have a fresh technology forced upon it. Electricity. She had a nightmare that Joaquim dragged their bloody newborn to the opera by its umbilical cord. A dry and lippy afternoon in June. Guttural gusts rattled tiles, stroked shutters. Teased sacks of cinnamon. Who brought those? It was Feast Day. Grey homburg hats, loosened from bald men, made huge loops in alleys, signing streets off. Narcosis. Provoking crows. Last night, four drunks were locked up. Some thieves had tried to steal a Macanese gold ring. Charge, unable to be contained within the opera house, spiralled into the square. Like a music lesson. Late Mass nearly ending. She smiled, prayed. Had wished for a boy. Today, her body delivered that. To be protected by her favourite saint. Anthony of Lisbon. Also born Fernando. Who left Lisbon for Morocco at a young age. Turning his back on his family’s wealth. Died near Padua. Thirty-five. Of Holy Fire. Of ergotism. When he died, children cried in the streets. Church bells rang on their own. His tongue refused to decompose. Stayed moist. Furry with language. The language that carries on without us. Her apartment was as quiet as a dead saint. Periods of strain. Sweating through lace. Island sweat. What about going back? Memories of running all over lush volcanoes. Would suspend her in this life. The birth will be front page news in the Evening Mail. Her husband’s reputation had ensured it. What else would be there? An earthquake in the Río de la Plata. Revamping coastlines and rivers. Woodwork creaked. Furniture moved. Glassware threw their bodies off cupboard ledges like in the ancient days. Yes. But what else would be there? In the morning. Wilhelm II had become the last German emperor. In every photograph, his left hand clutches a pair of drooping. Snowdrops. No. White gloves. Phantom limb. To make his withered arm seem longer. Less wooden. But what else? In London’s Crystal Palace, music has just been recorded for the very first time. Thousands chanting Israel in Egypt. Yellow paraffin cylinders struggle to cling onto the trace of those notes. What will survive those cylinders will be barely. Audible. It is the sound of a leviathan. Chugging through history. Snippets of the oratorio will preserve. Mourning Joseph. Plague and blight. Death of the eldest. Exodus. All impressed there in the wax. More or less. When Fernando was born, she first thought. How sadness. Flowed straight into his face. He was born sometime between. Three and four in the afternoon. For the rest of her life she would, with a great feeling of guilt. No matter how many times he begged her to. Just remember. Exactly. The precision of his little birth.

Jay Gao is a poet and the author of Imperium (Carcanet, 2022). He is a Contributing Editor at The White Review. Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, he earned his MFA at Brown University, and currently lives in New York where he is a PhD student at Columbia University.