A sunny reflection on the obstacles a couple has overcome

The Horse and the Monkey

I tell you that I am horse, you
a monkey, fated by the Chinese
zodiac to remain together as long
as both partners practise the art
of compromise. The horse and
monkey can now be found
riding the wind at the fifth base
of Mount Fuji. We hold each other
as if our limbs were the mountain’s
melting snow. All those days when
I believed the odds were bruised:
our zodiacs, my Chinese parents.
Your tofu skin against the butter
of mine. Moments before the plane
delivers us to ground, I beg amid
the turbulence – please – to Buddha,
even to the Lord who would never
grant me permission to love you.
I am bargaining with these whorls
of steel to keep going, in spite of
everything. At home, my mother
greets us both with these words:
I love monkeys. They are auspicious
creatures. In that moment, did you
realise that we were being blessed?

Mary Jean Chan represented her native Hong Kong in fencing. As governing metaphor and organising principle of her first collection, Flèche, the sport provides enlivening strategies for the poetic realisation of loss and rebellion. The flèche (literally “arrow”) is a surprise attack, demanding speed and timing – a paradigm for the way every poem should meet the reader, perhaps. Other “moves” provide the volume with its three subdivisions (Parry, Riposte and Corps-à-Corps). The Horse and the Monkey is included in Riposte, a title that inevitably suggests an analogy with the young Ezra Pound’s 1912 collection, Ripostes.

It’s important that the reader resist shoehorning the poems into their “moves”: fencing provides a larger, richer symbolism. Once the sport of sword-wielding knights, it gave the younger Chan the space in which to imagine and shape her sexual identity. “As a teenager, fencing was the closest thing / I knew to desire,” she writes in Practice. The rebellion for Chan’s protagonist is often, though not only, against parents’ heterosexual expectations. Parries and thrusts of anger towards a traditionalist mother are not so much muted as complicated by empathy and tenderness. In a five-sentence Preface, in which each sentence strikes me as a kind of flèche, the last reads: “5. This is a book of love poems.”

The Chinese zodiac supplies liberating, sensuous animal personae for the lovers in The Horse and the Monkey. The title resembles that of an Aesop fable. The poem also evokes the biblical ark, once we know the couple is in transit.

In the opening words, when the two zodiac identities are declared (“I tell you that I am horse …”) there’s a fleeting echo of the colloquial “I tell you” – which, without the demonstrative “that”, would be argumentatively insistent. The poem’s voice is gentler, and skips lightly through the time zones of tense, (the “telling” might be imperfective, a repeated act of telling to create reassurance) but is not without a didactic quality. It’s interesting, too, to notice the difference the presence of the indefinite article makes: “I am horse, you / a monkey.” The power dynamic favours the speaker as pure, representative horse, not “a horse” – although we shouldn’t discount the possibility of a pun. Desire, nervousness or atmospheric conditions, could make the speaker additionally hoarse.

The odds against the relationship’s flourishing are described as “bruised” – a particularly vivid image in the fencing context, when a slipped foil can bruise skin, as misplaced love can bruise the deeper self. Images suggest evanescence: the lovers “hold each other / as if our limbs were the mountain’s melting snow”. Mutual nurturing and nourishment are cradled in skin and its delicate, difficult colours: “Your tofu skin against the butter /of mine.”) The two knights are embattled, “riding the wind”, “bargaining with these whorls / of steel”.

Deflection seems part of the movement here. The threat to the couple is not because the horse and monkey are a less than ideally matched zodiac pairing. The fear ruefully acknowledged in prayers to the Buddha, and “even to the Lord who would never / grant me permission to love you” is not merely of physical “turbulence”.

Yet the poem doesn’t let disaster happen. Landing and arrival are safe, and swiftly effected; the speaker’s mother expresses cheery approval of “monkeys”, although it’s not quite clear whether it’s the animal itself she holds in such high regard. From other poems, we know that the mother who has angrily opposed her daughter’s sexuality has also made an appearance as an accepting “fantasy mother”. So we might wonder if mother and fantasy have now merged. This interpretation is almost affirmed by the emphasis of the line break, when the speaker asks, again with a hint of teasing challenge, “In that moment did you / realise that we were being blessed?” Notice the pronoun, “we” – implying the inclusion of both lovers, monkey and horse, same-sex couple. I think we would be justified in hearing an implied half-rhyme for “flèche” and “flesh” in “blessed” and feeling that this, on the whole, is a happy thrust of sound.

Ezra Pound once said: “The essential thing about a poet is that he build us his world.” It could be the perfect description of Mary Jean Chan’s achievement in Flèche.

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