Memory Call

I was called upon on a humid and sultry evening
By a long-time-no-see classmate. Not so excited as I wondered,
How such a reunion would be.
Chit-chat about those acquaintances that no longer see each other?
Or update the irrelevant information about so and so?
Or perhaps, …
Many possibilities appeared, but no one sounded promising.
Still, I cheerfully walked out,
Expecting to see her current face.

Captured on a photo with hallucinating light,
That face once was discreetly slotted in the album
On my way to university.
Occasionally, I would turn to that face and
It would become the source of curiosity among my roommates.
I had lost it for ten years, and
I had never tried to find it
Till that evening.

She was not there yet,
So I sat down idly and waited.
When her voice came over from another end of line,
I couldn't respond it immediately.
Her face was so vague in my mind,
But her silhouette was vivid on the restaurant's window.
'We would not know each other in the street',
She told me so with that familiar broad smile.

Her frankness dismantled the veil of eighteen years,
Immediately brought me back
To the secret garden we once shared, in which
Many idle afternoons were galvanized
By the sweet impulses of our puberty.
Although the boredom of life had claimed her since then,
Our timely meeting
Added nothing but
Blurred my memory of her face.
Alas, the photo I lost ten years ago
Finally found me.

Homage to a Geometrician

Convex piles up convex,
Hyperbolic paraboloids chases another paraboloids,
Columns twists into their double, quadruple, and octet,
All these evocative forms are assembled into
Architectural stanzas, being uttered loudly
By the Geometrician of our time - Antonia Gaudi.
The dictum - ‘Curved lines are perfect’
Commands the absolute obedience of all straight forms.
…
In the labyrinth of curvatures,
On the manifold of equilibrated arches,
Among the twisted pillars and distorted roofs,
There stood Gaudi’s cosmos.
Lofty and sensual,
It fills the void of one’s imagination.
Twisted but mysterious,
It silently mocks straight and lifeless buildings.
…
It overflows; it surpasses; and above all,
It transcends.
Where is that eternal power from?
Gazing at the vortex of these curvatures,
I saw the grimace of the Geometrician.
He is in it.