Something that was something
else yesterday
with no place to go but down
but not quite enough
to get away
and so becomes a spectacle
to change caught in between
changes
increasing
like a debt or identity or
anything else imagined
but its own
weight is real enough
if you can
wait it out
that will be enough too
The sun departs through a throng of clouds
on the horizon– an overexposed photo
of an old explosion. Did it happen in our time?
the cold street wants to know. The street
which is always asking, asking! An amateur’s
snapshot, I tell it. I am always on this street
that happens to be going the way
I am going. It knows only one question
but has the patience to repeat it.
Without that question to what purpose
could a street put itself? I know eventually
the pavement will give way and the question
through the voice of dirt and rocks
and sun-warmth escaping long after dark
will sound like a song without words
or the faded caption on an old photograph
someone took of us looking at the sun
standing still against the pathless sky
The bluejay’s query from the previous twilight
hangs in the mostly empty air between branches.
On a brown maple leaf last night’s tear
has still not fallen. Though in a few hours
this moment will be gone like all the others
even grief sometimes has to wait its turn
Note: While preparing for the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival — and working on some book design for “The Drift” and “Moon & Shadow” (tentative title for the collection of poems featuring Mei Yao-ch’en) — I will from time to time post a poem from one of my books published before I began this blog. This is from The Artificial Horizon, published in 2013.
Quiet night. Even the crickets are whispering,
Beneath the green stamp of this date, your name
In a language I can’t speak but can read.
Above the summer moon’s shiny memory
A thought of you coaxes deep stars
Into the precise constellation
That is your voice saying my name.
The rudder of years has shown my choice.
This year will not accumulate around you
Any better than a kitten accumulates moths.
The moment is the distribution, not a sum.
Of everything a cricket can sing, or not.
Of every thing you understand because it’s not clear and caught.
So I will walk in the empty feeling house.
The night hangs on every wall, black mirrors.
When I look at it I see myself looking in
Wondering what I am doing out there without you.
The danger of reflection is thinking you’re alone
When you’re not. Of thinking crickets without voices
Are whispering your name when it’s me whispering,
In a language I can’t read but can speak.
Late night walks are making more sense
as I realize how little of my life
I am really seeing. Making it home each night
through the black ink of every word of hope
and doom engraved into the emptiness
surrounding me—isn’t it much better
practice than bounding about in daylight
thinking I am understanding everything?
In the dark the actual tree spreads without end,
across time and space, and I begin to sense
that my blindness also travels a route
set in deep earth, exposed to the sky.
When the moon sinks low in the western sky
I pour a day’s memories into its gold cup
as the old rules state. Evening is cooling off
but mild, as if between myself and
the stars there is an owl flying away while at the same
time a distant unknown bird is approaching.
When they pass each other I am finding the key
in my pocket and feeling blindly for the lock.
When the cup is locked in the cupboard
of the past for another day, in the quiet house
I take out the moments I withheld from the moon
and place them in the dark above me: your hand
on my arm, your head against my shoulder.
The phone ringing. The living warmth of you
like a foreign language I can suddenly read
as words pour into the room and we listen.
Roads diminish and clarify. People disappear.
The skunk is just being himself on the edge of the dark sidewalk.
On a certain night even he can see the dog-star.
Not shaking off the weather. All last summer the stooped old lady
laid her traps and could not flush him out of hiding. All summer
I spent mornings freeing trapped squirrels and possums
before the noon sun dehydrated them. She never came out
to see and neither did the skunk in her crawlspace. Now, crossing
the road, he looks up to the house as if remembering
or as if seeing through walls and latticework: here’s a place
I could make a home beneath. Here is a place I can depart
and come back to. A place I can impart the secret:
How to disappear but never leave. How to settle in
when all you will do at this age is preparation for leaving.
I would kneel with you any hour and pray to find that place.
If we wait long enough the wind will move the invisible aside.
Though there is far more space
between raindrops than there is rain
it is natural to feel the rain and not the dry space.
This evening: inside, dry, all I feel is the space
We disappear into the unseen ahead of us:
Already built, a bridge will reveal itself
when we arrive where a bridge is needed.
We’re not the first to make this trip.
I don’t want to believe it, either—
so I won’t, until the image clears.
Then there is only what there is
and I won’t have to believe anything
I can’t see, or in anything I can’t see.
Maybe belief is only what we practice
while waiting. I only know I’d kill anything
and hold it up to the sun to see you safe.
Translations from the English 