English

Out of a motionless infernal
shudder and clang of steel on steel
as wagons moved toward the eternal,
a sudden silence: I was healed.

The stormcloud of my sickness fled
on a breath. A flickering of eyes,
and I saw my mother by my bed
and gazed at her without surprise.

Free! Helpless, yes, to move the hands
clasped on my chest — but I had no
desire to move. The rustling sounds
(like cypress trees, like streams that flow

across vast prairies seeking seas
that don"t exist) were thin, insistent:

A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.

***

Blinded by light or black cloth —
so many ways
not to see others suffer.

***

Too much longing:

it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.

***

From very far or very close —
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.

***

As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,
we listen to the murmuring dead.

***

I read that in this famous person"s poems " she searches
for signs of what lies beneath and beyond the self. "
Which seemed to me pointless, as if you wouldn"t know

whether to paint with egg tempera or eat it. At eighteen,
I came across Tolstoy"s " What is Art? " where he said
an artist is different from other people because instead

of eating an apple he paints it. Even then I thought why
can"t he paint it and then eat it, the way at eight, the war
just over, I stood shoeless in line in the snowy playground

Paper creased is
with a touch
made less by half,
reduced as much

again by a second
fold — so the wish
to press our designs
can diminish

what we hold.
But by your hand"s
careful work,
I understand

how this unleaving
makes of what"s before
something finer
and finally more.

Every reader loves the way he tells off
the sun, shouting busy old fool
into the English skies even though they
were likely cloudy on that seventeenth-century morning.

And it"s a pleasure to spend this sunny day
pacing the carpet and repeating the words,
feeling the syllables lock into rows
until I can stand and declare,
the book held closed by my side,
that hours, days, and months are but the rags of time.

But after a few steps into stanza number two,
wherein the sun is blinded by his mistress"s eyes,

Aluminum tank
indifferent in its place

behind a glass door
in the passageway,

like a tea urn
in a museum case;

screaming-machines
that dumbly spend each day

waiting for gas or smoke
or hands or heat,

positioned like beige land mines
overhead,

sanguine on walls,
or posted on the street

like dwarf grandfather clocks
spray painted red;

little gray hydrant
in its warlike stance;

old fire escape,
all-weather paint job peeling,

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

in the pale night. May our shoots

I make a knife of words.
I sit here waiting.
I play with crumbs.

Her eyes that should look
straight at me are
toward the window, glazed —
husband"s horizon?

Not armored. Only armed
with pots and pans.
Not out of arm"s reach,
beyond curtains of doorbells,
garden gates.

She puts up ironwork
in her eyes; it draws a bolt
over what"s real —
then looks at me.

I wish I"d brought my saw.

It always comes back like this: light streaming in, the sound of water
in a basin I know is white my mother"s footsteps on the tile floor;
and the long road at day"s end the desert all around us, the sun
red and bearing down, the sun so large the sky seemed smaller,
burdened by its weight. What"s left is souvenir — plastic skeleton
I"d clutched in the market memento mori — and fragment,
memory incomplete, complete as an augur of loss, piecemeal