English Poems

Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word,
Nor more than a honey bee
Takes on his foot
From an overspilling jar.

Why I’ m going to the Taklamakan Desert:
the emptiness there.

Why I’ m going to the Taklamakan Desert
at seventy-five, leaving all words behind: the cry
of the emptiness there.

Why I’ m going to the Taklamakan Desert:
I can no longer stand
the world’ s greed
or mine.

There, in the Taklamakan Desert,
the silence of a thousand-year-old skull.

Translated from the Korean

You have a strange pet —
one eye is a cat’ s, the other a sheep’ s.
Yet, it won’ t socialize with felines,
will attack any flock.
On moonlit nights,
it wanders on the roof.

When you’ re alone
it will lie in your lap
preoccupied, slowly studying you
until — on its face — a challenge.

Translated from the Chinese

Someone’ s coming
from the other world.

Hiss of night rain.

Someone’ s going there now.
The two are sure to meet.

Translated from the Korean

It lists beneath a sycamore
swashing in high summer leaf,
and takes a hit from underneath:
a root knuckle bulges along the floor.

Its eight loopholes have fissures, sprouting
thistles; through each the wheat is fattening.
“What’ s this thing   for?” A starling sings
its wind-up song. The sun slides out.

And this taste of piss, that Fetherlite
slumped in the corner, those Holsten cans,
the markered slogan
do not try to answer. Might.

Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikes
and kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires,
point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their heads
at the sky’ s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance.

The truck grinds by
and pumps out grit;
the road glints and
goes still.

The barn owl that
had not finished here
returns. But with
its fill

of scavenges,
face ruffled in mulch,
the vole is lost
and safe

so the silent specter
flits away, its
moon face to
the moon

and rears unknown
against a copse,
claws tipped for
the strafe

and something dies
too soon.

He filled her between
the hay bales in
that Dutch barn, now
abandoned,

We wash up side by side
to find each other

in the speakable world,
and, lulled into sense,

inhabit our landscape;
the curve

of that chair draped
with your shirt;

my glass of  water
seeded overnight with air.

After this bed
there’ ll be another,

so we’ ll roll
and keep rolling

until one of  us
will roll alone and try to roll

the other back — a trick
no one’ s yet pulled off —

and it’ ll be
as if   I dreamed you, dear,

Only this boy moves
between the runes of trees
on his tricycle
when an eagle swoops,
releases two arrows
from its silver wings, and melts
away faster than lightning.
Then a loud whistle
and a bang like dry thunder.
In a blink the boy sees
his house roof sink.
Feels his ears ripped off.
The blast puffs up a fawn smoke
bigger than a mountain cloud.
The slow begonias rattle
their scarlet like confetti.
Metal slashes
the trees and ricochets.
Wires and pipes snap

One way to draw France is in scallops:

Dunkirk to Brest,
Brest to Saint-Jean-de-Luz,

The imperceptible stone sag
of certain dolmens
over the Pyrenees between Saint-Jean

& Banyuls-sur-Mer

Then, to Nice

Nice, skirting the Alps to Lauterbourg

From Lauterbourg back
to where you began

For the meticulous,
the additions of Cherbourg, Toulon, &
even Le Havre,

Maybe Givet

Yours is a green diorama
It contains several kilowatts of sun,
a superabundance of flowers