Free Skate

by Micah Lau





At an ice rink in downtown Seoul she takes my arm

as we slide with reckless speed, an unreal concurrence

of precarious grace, reflected beams revolving overhead

streaking bright in dark, simulating winter night in July.

The most technically beautiful, she says as we move,

was Kim Yuna, also from Bucheon, back in Vancouver

from which I remember the Dubé/Davison free skate

to “The Way We Were,” their synchronous motion

so truthfully fitting a real lost love it stings to think

as choreographed longing, a well-practiced sorrow.

Jessica Dubé was too far behind on the triple salchow

when she fell backwards, and the scar on her face

from Bryce Davison’s blade three years ago

leveled with his eyes as she drew near to recover,

in agony again, holding distance for the camel spin

that had sliced her before. A closeness that cuts

is a mistake not made twice, but what heart does not want,

in some sinister way, to leave marks on the other,

ineluctible change that remains long after love?

The next morning her aunt drives us into Bucheon

to show me their old home, little girls riding bicycles

in side streets, turning off into wide playgrounds,

steel swings in concrete lots under identical gray

high-rise apartment complexes. I wonder if Kim Yuna

took her bike along this path of trimmed birch, unaware

of the pressure to come, how effortless fluency is a form

of concealed pain, that performing alone escapes a predestiny

to hurt or to be hurt, accidentally, it seems, in half-turns.

Leaving the city, the road curves up a forested mountain,

and I get carsick in the back seat, anxious to stop or know

how much longer we will be on the road. I say in English,

which her aunt does not speak, that she needs to tell me

where we are going beforehand, I hate when this happens,

I’d rather not be dragged along like a child. She says I can

fly back home at any time. We park near a building with a cross,

and she tells me to wait in the car. Through the rear window

I see flowers, and sober white marble, a grid of graves,

a columbarium upstairs. The cross on the roof is wired to glow

neon red at night. She meets with a woman I recognize

from pictures as her dead father’s mother, whom she

does not embrace. When she returns I’ll say sorry, sometimes

time rewrites every line into injury, I don’t know why,

and I watch as she walks back, wiping her eyes, holding,

with both hands, a can of melon soda to settle my stomach.





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