Red Mandarin Dress

see.
    The recall of the red mandarin dress
    wears me out, flashing in the flowers,
    your bare feet, your soft hand: the stress
    of memory strips me of waking hours.
    But we are flattened, framed in the zoom
    of one moment, click, and cloud and rain
    approaching fast, a doomful gloom
    scurries across the horizon again,
    Oh that is all I know, all I see.
    Mother, you drink the cup for me.
    “There’s no cup in the picture,” Yu said in bewilderment.
    Chen wasn’t sure if the last image about the cup came from Hamlet , in which the queen drinks the poison for her son. In his college years, he had read a Freudian interpretation of it. He vaguely remembered.
    “It’s about Hamlet and his mother,” Chen said, deciding not to explain any more. “There are more things in heaven and earth than in a case report.”
    “I’m damned,” Yu said, shaking his head like a rattle drum.