Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April
Incense rises up the wall
in front of my mother’s painting
A village clings to a cliff a thousand
white rooms open to the sun
No separation of inside or outside
to me this painting is a memory
Of her, about memory about how something
no longer exists but still exists
Like smoke from an incense stick
it is entirely spent lighter than air
More solid than the air we breathe
my mother painted it from a photograph
To learn perspective
detail from painting by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner
The last I saw of the antlers
the cloud resembling a tomato
half materialized tree leaning
against years of gypsy weather
the old woman always
in the background always goes last and
she is the only one who comes back
but now you have decided to leave her
there her face whitewashed with relief
not finished enough to paint over
a tree begins behind her a brown stroke
in the foreground a young woman
her hands hold something valuable
you can see it in her face
even though the thing she holds
is almost out of the picture not yet realized
red vest light blue garment against
the yellow field past the dirt path
what will she hold and will she offer
it before the white brush comes down
you dab her face as if wiping away
a tear and promising her she will stay
the road darkens in the fading light
or is it growing relief the old woman’s
face does not change the tree
behind her branches off the canvas
[with a nod to bussokuseki’s “Earnest Offering” and ideas of erasure it inspired]
Translations from the English 