Pui Ying Wong

The white horse outside the station
is without a coachman,
has no gild harness or garlands.

He sees me,
tired after a long journey,

my head full of the rushes
of monochromatic towns, their bleakness.

He treads toward me, untethered,
and moves the light with him
so that the dark pavement
shines like a royal court.

I search my pocket and find
just a comb. Had I known I’d have filled
my rucksack with berries and oats.

In a night known only to us
he’ll have nothing to remember me by.

Pui Ying Wong is the author of Fanling In October (Barrow Street Press, 2023) as well as three other poetry collections: The Feast, An Emigrant’s Winter and Yellow Plum Season along with two chapbooks: Sonnet For a New Country and Mementos. She has received a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Chicago Quarterly Review, New Letters, Zone 3 and others. Born in Hong Kong she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.