Peonies rise a child’s arm length above the earth.
In a grocery lot puddle miles of clouds lay exhausted.
Following the moon’s invisible stem you find
Night’s dark loam, where unseen roots bind.
The day is squeezed through the city’s buildings
Like water through a whale’s baleen
Leaving people harmlessly stuck to offices and stairways
Pressed against a wall in a hallway or sitting at a cafe
Table on the sidewalk. I, too small to be a meal for time
and commerce, slip through, discarded, on the quiet street
With my coffee. The sky is the blue of a baby’s iris.
A baby as big as a galaxy who is far from forming
Thoughts cohesive enough to create a world.
The only clouds in the sky slip together
Over the street into a momentary shape, a character
in a language not native to me but familiar.
I watch it pull itself apart. The city places orange cones
Around me to protect me while I stare and take a picture.
When I get home I discover it is the Chinese character
For “write.” I sit down with some paper and a blue pen
But every word drifts in a different direction as soon
As I write it and the page is as firm and white
As the sclera of a baby’s eye, of a galaxy whose
Unformed thoughts are rolling inward. The city blinks and
Before anyone can take a picture the day smashes its tail
on the surface of afternoon and is gone into the depths.
My boy’s breathing is fine. The moon is late rising,
The palm of night presses down. A few stars.
As eyes close the pressure inside and outside
The eyelid equalizes like the pressure inside
And outside the house. The house sees nothing too.
The wind like Zhu Xi sees nothing and begins
To investigate things with clarity. A few windy
Mornings ago I drove my son to the hospital
After he could not stand up because of the pain.
The night pressed in on the windows of the car.
Though it was perfectly still outside my panic
Drove the air into my resisting frame.
Zhu Xi was so still and undisturbed
He could have been lying against my windshield
And I would have seen right through
Him whispering knowledge and action
Are indivisible. After morphine and the three
Incisions, after the handcuffed prisoner
Who swallowed metal things was rolled out
Of the ER, after the appendix, vestigial
Like a scholarly appendix, was removed
Zhu Xi was an untouched cup of coffee.
A still Saturday morning parking lot.
Days later I am still there. Zhu Xi
In the back seat because you are
Beside me. Zhu Xi pressed against
The bedroom window like a giant moth
We look through waiting for the moon
Through closed eyelids to appear on
His wing. My son’s breathing is fine.
The high point of the ground is the canopy of bear.
The space between that and the canopy of bird
Is the heart’s canopy, where we walk across the shapes
Of what’s gone missing but nothing is buried where
The ground heaves up with the work of the woodland
Cultures. They knew the shapes were what
They’d built from earth to impress themselves.
The fleeting things don’t really come and go–
They are among us still, in your hand on my back.
In how far a word will fly to reach its nest.
In the sweet air we want to take off our socks
And the song of the grass is softening
In the dark something moves slowly across space
Even the wind is taking its time
The silver maple’s a month early getting leaves
I feel that way too — for each heartbeat that flies from me
Tonight there’s a silent starling waiting in the walnut grove
Who am I in the porch’s silence
Before the storm? A song
Of any more sense
Than mindless wind chimes?
They say merely ‘something is happening’
Good or bad it is the same thing
Until something drowns them out
Knocks them down or finishes
Happening their silence means
Not that nothing is happening
Because nothing cannot happen
Nothing is not phenomenal any
Wind chime could tell you but rather
That whatever may be
Happening is not moving them
Nevertheless they have enough
To say right now as cloud shadows
Chase light back into the sun
And knowing nothing really goes
Backwards I’m listening for the storm
To sing a song that chases
Rain faster forward into flower
Loss swells like a bruise,
inhibiting movement,
making everything that’s tender
a trial: though it’s permanent, the
loss, I mean, the swelling goes
and takes the tenderness away
even when you may want just
a little to stay. Absence, though,
can inflate like a nylon balloon
on a cool spring morning: filled
with warm emptiness absence takes you
Above it all, floats you over the impasse
that seemed impossible to cross
on foot, shifts perspective to higher
thoughts: here in this basket
of bewilderment and wonder,
you can stay with me even
a little longer than we thought.
On the sky press even the spaces must be set in metal
And sit above the text of dreams to print night’s pure black.
Sometimes that space like the space between us
Slips into the day and rises above the waking words
and becomes visible space. It ascends from the pull
of the moon and pushes forward like a panther,
Like a runner in a darkening wood who suddenly sees
The trees don’t block the path, they make the path.
The sound of crows chased my dreams
Away this morning as effortlessly
As they drove the quiet vulture from
The black walnut tree behind the house
My family lives in. I won’t call anything mine,
Not even you. Not even the crows who spin out
And then return, black boomerangs.
They leave so they can come back.
The breeze picks up and forgets. Anything
outside, like wind chimes in the dark,
could be the voice of the vulture’s dream.
Two pine trees, like brothers who won’t talk.
The Watchman’s rattle. Used to bind, to tie.
Used for the sound. The lining of the shoe,
hip bone. An example, from the above,
a register of a love which means two things,
To read or to row a boat.
A tent. A stick. An octopus.
Only two of its legs mean the number eight.
I can hear the Lover’s tears.
A mountain turns on its ribs and sniffs the air
And sees us: two boats fastened side by side.
Translations from the English 