I know I’ ll lose her.
One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’ t
do this anymore or I’ ll say I can’ t. Confused
only about how long to stay, we’ ll meet and close it up.
She won’ t let me hold her. I won’ t care that my
eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring.
Nothing from her will reach me after that.
I’ ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house
In prayer:
quiet opening,
my artery is a thin
shadow on paper —
margin of long grass,
ruderal hair, sister to this
not yet part of our bodies
your lyric corpus of seed
in rough drafts of pine ash,
chaogao or grass calligraphy
in rough drafts of pine ash —
your lyric corpus of seed
not yet part of our bodies:
ruderal hair, sister to this
margin of long grass,
shadow on paper,
my artery is a thin
quiet opening
in prayer.
May we blossom every fifty years
without afflicting the people.
May our seedpods nourish rodents
who roam our groves
without rebuking lands with famine.
May sweet potatoes and rice save us.
May ginger and turmeric flourish
to the bitter distaste of rats
while tresses of bamboo flowers
changeling white wasps
load the groves with seed
in rare perennial synchrony.
May our sisters flower en masse
hundreds of square miles apart
One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.
One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.
Sometimes the rain shines
Just when the sun reigns,
And that was the way it is
Beyond those French doors
That late afternoon here
In this mind’ s early evening
Where they still fade in
That cool color Polaroid,
Pastel shades of her prom dress,
A bowl of double peonies,
Promising, precocious,
Trying, trying to open.
•
Rain so dark I
can’ t get through —
train going by
in a hurry. The voice
said walk or die, I
walked, — the train
and the voice all
blurry. I walked with
my bones and my heart
of chalk, not even
a splintered notion:
days of thought, nights
of worry, — lonesome
train in a hurry.
A tree that grew in the Garden of Eden
a tree of innocence called
the Tree of Good and Evil. It was harmless
as opposites are in balance. It was also
tasteless,
the taste of innocence before it is betrayed.
When God removed the wall
he gave the lemon thorns and bitterness because it had
no hostility.
It is a taste we want most to subdue. It asks
to be left alone.
We use it with fish and tea. We sugar it.
I have seen the arrested
shrub inform the crag with grief.
Lichens crust the rocks with red.
Thorns punctuate the leaf.
Sorrow is not a desert
where one endures the other —
but footing lost and halting
step. And then another.
Translation broadens language
as divorce and remarriage extend family.
Born to fade and break, facts
huddle inside black brackets.
Work means inquisition as a child
separates a cricket’ s wings from thorax.
Ideas come apart as monads, metastasizing
rhapsody on the edge of delicate dusk.
Thunder sounds in the distance or television,
always on in this constant rain.
My father’ s dying
resembles nothing so much
as a small village
building itself
in the mind of a traveler
who reads about it
and thinks to go there.
The journey is imagined
in a way not even felt
as when years ago
I knew my father would die someday.
The idea came up as fast
as a curve in a road
which opens out
to an unexpected vista,
and now in this journey
the road gravel crunches
under my tires. I miss
some of the streets,
get lost, get lost.
