let’s go outside,

she tells me,
in the classroom with faded posters sleeping on gray walls,
announcing the first conquest of the cultural revolution and the corollary
to the pythagorean theorem,

we can look at the stars.

i have no time for sentimental
astronomical observations.
i need to study, i tell her,
since my handwriting quivers at each dash in my own name,
and i formulas dissolve from my memory
as they leak from the tip of my pen
mingling with the paper,
lost within the marginalia of futile doodles on the corner of
my crinkled pages.

she says
home is only three months away
and nothing we do here counts for college, right?
so she excuses herself  —

?????????  —

and when five minutes is puffed out from our math teacher’s cigarette,
she’s already out in the open air.

my coat is heavy, but not enough for
the wind that blows sands from the gobi desert
into my eyelashes like sharp snowflakes,
like some joke of a blizzard.
i wonder, blinking out dirt and minerals,
if a wandering mongolian nomad in ancient dynasties
had touched the same grain of sand, perhaps,
or had his hair rustled by the same breeze.

i wish that i could breathe in the smell of pine in winter,
of candles in department stores
that i usually smell this time of year,
yet in the air i only see the green vestiges
of wasted fuel
or the violent purple trace
of smoke drifting out from steel factories up north.

i find her sitting by the flagpole,
cross-legged under a banner of red and gold, blue and orange.

it’s a good day for stargazing, she says,
yeah, it is,
i say.
she shushes me — be quiet.
or what? i say, or i’ll scare away the stars?
and we both laugh.

we lie on our backs on the flag pedestal,
pythagorean theorem and math class forgotten,
laughing and pointing at the splashes of nebulas and shooting stars in the night,
although we both know,
under the smog-filled sky,
that the fiery comet that we just saw whiz by
was most likely the flight to kuala lumpur,
taking off from the capital airport.