Market of Asia

One day when I am old, you will take me here

in the cold. I will thread my arm through yours.

My sons, I will be so much smaller then

but still I will search the aisle

for a jar, a bottle, a plastic packet

containing a memory that refuses to leave

something that a parent or grandparent

once tended to on a stove. I will grasp for

the tenuous, the half-remembered, the snatches:

my nose to a prickly fruit, tongue to a sample spoon.

The seasons and festivals will go on without me

older than I ever will be and more distant.

I have only what I learned in books

second-hand, cut by repeated diasporas. 

I will have taught you the last of the forgotten tones

of my mother's Penang tongue, my father’s Teochew accent

subsumed in it, the Hakka woman who cared for

a tiny version of myself, always hovering on my lips. 

We will reminisce about childhood trips

back to the heat of the past, the aunties and uncles

unrelated by blood who were kind to us

who cooked all that was good

who called you handsome, foreign, other.

We will never be able to return.