How to Be a Fern

Blue-white then inky grey then hailstones
go pitter-patter on the glass.
The city I loved whose name I’ve erased returns
between me and the glass
as the thunder bends like saxophones
buried inside one of Keats’s urns.
Give me a second chance, the city insinuates.
A legion of storm clouds evaluates
me. I was young, opened my heart
too soon and the wind tore it apart
just like that. Wind was never a city
except when it drained the blood,
stuffed silences like cotton wool
into my ears, eyes, nose, asshole,
mouth, and preserved what was left in me in mud
Silence is the city I still kiss, not reason
with. Many springs have swung by
and I keep kissing, unfurling my tongue
for the city in me I can’t return
to isn’t rain, wind, or glass. I’m no fern.
Tell me how to be, and I’ll learn
and unlearn.

From Kit Fan’s recent collection, The Ink Cloud Reader, How to Be a Fern is a pained love poem to Hong Kong. “The city I loved whose name I’ve erased” suggests both self-preservation through emotional reticence, and a political context necessitating “erasure”. Fan has lived in the UK since the age of 21.

The changeable weather seems lightly treated in the early lines of the poem. But wind
and storm clouds may be images of menace: in a neighbouring poem, The Shape of the Wind, one of those shapes is “a cloud of tearful gas”. In How to Be a Fern, weather seems ominously claustrophobic: like the “glass” repeated in lines two and four, it embodies entrapment. In a striking audio-visual image, “the thunder bends like saxophones / buried inside one of Keats’s urns”. It revives memory, but cannot “bend” a way out, or shatter colonial walls.

The bending of the saxophones connects nicely with the verb “insinuates”. The city neither pleads for nor demands the speaker’s return, its “second chance”. There’s less persuasive subtlety when “a legion of storm clouds evaluates” him. The violence of the wind in the ensuing lines, felt by a remembered self, young and exposed, urges the poem to a more emotionally direct and physically intense confrontation with suppression.

A kind of mummification process, it’s suggested, is set in motion by the “wind”. The latter has drained the blood, packed the orifices, “and preserved what was left in me in mud”. There’s no full stop after “mud” and yet a capital S for “Silence”. The nouns are forced to stick to one another, although “Silence is the city I still kiss, not reason / with”.

In the end, the city is felt inside the speaker. The speaker’s tongue is not for language, but for kissing. We might imagine the curled tip of a fern trying to unfurl in a prison of double-glazing. Perhaps the constant silent “kissing” of the city takes the form of making poems for it?

Kit Fan as technician is a poet of courage. He experiments with various structures in The Ink Cloud Reader, neither afraid to break rules nor to keep in touch with tradition. In How to Be a Fern a small act of courage lies in the final denial of the central metaphor: “I’m no fern”. It’s not the only dismissive gesture, and not only a dismissive gesture. “Tell me how to be, and I’ll learn / and unlearn” opens the window a little way and retrieves the hope for future change.