English Poems

Ghost I house
In this old flat —
Your outpost —
My aftermath

Fellow fugitive
Forgive yourself
And me thereby
Thus we can live
Whatever’ s left
Of time for us,
Each day a gift
We take on trust

The stars are
Although I do not sing
About them —
The sky and the trees
Are indifferent
To whom they please
The rose is unmoved
By my nose
And the garland in your hair
Although your eyes be lakes, dies

A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut.

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure — dusky flutter — trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who’ ve engraved on her locket phrases in script: “glide on a blade” and “rustling precedes the shuck.” This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.

China is made of earth, of sun-dried mud.

In this part of China everything is made from the earth:
the houses, the walls around cities, and villages,
the tombs scattered over the countryside.
Even the people.

There are hills below that appear to be piles of mud
set out to dry in the sun, naked,
without a single tree or bush.
They crowd around the landscape
like the coils of bulging intestines
tossed on the ground outside butchers' shops,
slowly unraveling.

Sometimes we fly so low that we almost touch them.

Never mind what you think.
The old man did not rush
Recklessly into the coop the last minute.
The chickens hardly stirred
For the easy way he sang to them.
Red sun is burning out
Past slag heaps of the mill. The old man
Touches the blade of his killing knife
With his fat thumb.
I’ m in the backyard on a quilt
Spread out under the heavy dark plums
He cooks for his whiskey.

I watch the woods for deer as if I’ m armed.
I watch the woods for deer who never come.
I know the hes and shes in autumn
rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen
apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work
so I may let the crows in corn believe
it’ s me their caws are meant to warn,
and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves

We had two gardens.

A real flower garden
overhanging the road
(our miniature Babylon).
Paths which I helped
to lay with Aunt Winifred,
riprapped with pebbles;
shards of painted delph;
an old potato boiler;
a blackened metal pot,
now bright with petals.