Remember that warm anticipation
before the red dust obscured our ease
and the houses blew the sky down?
On this night the walls are so cold and
distant peaks enshrouded, I know what I’ll do:
I’ll sit here nearby. Sip a cup with you
as a star comes out. Let it all settle
until the world is clear again.
Trying to catch up with the hills rolling
beneath my feet I’m lost to your light
then at the mountain’s top you are waiting for me
unmoved by the ruckus and dust below
in this valley I’ll hear a bird, catch my breath
then keep running west til the Star River
laps at my feet–who would not climb mountain
after mountain to keep saying goodbye to you?
I’m tearing down a building
my friend is a skunk
I need a little friend
when I’m in a big fight
Here’s grief again–summoned by absence
it comes and even when absence flies it stays
taking the shape of the tree nothing is perched on
later this shape appears everywhere
without warning in full form as if it had been there
growing for years and years and we only
now just saw it—how did it grow so big
rooted so deeply in the middle of the road?
When the uninvited hand grasps your wrist
no matter how softly
something good is not coming
with that other hand
Even below freezing, the slight snow
melts under sun to show hard ground
But behind the tree trunk’s bulk it stays
whitish, slow-blurring across the day’s drift
The garden is in the recluse, not the other way around.
You rivers and mountains pale against the heights and gorges
She must climb. I am the hand in her mind where thought gets tough.
I am the step suddenly appearing. In the calm harvest fields I know
I have often been missing, off on the mountain’s other side.
But in the slow running river my boat is not far away,
she’ll call a breeze to fetch me faster than words paddle. Here in her
garden, I’ll meet the better me, nodding as I pass on my way to her.
Translations from the English 