You will never be at anchor.
There are more graves than waves at sea.
We sail through our dead with every step
And honor the skill of dead-reckoning — figure out
where you are from where you’ve been —
Always a looking-back. Just ahead
Of the breastbone, like cartilage that catches
Flight, is the curve that carves our path.
Out in the sky, no one sleeps.
–Lorca
The door opened to the boundaries of the hand.
The lines of tigers swam across your palm.
The lover’s collarbone is a galaxy of questions,
A swerve of star-white desire the planes of history
Fly beneath, orienting themselves to darting fish
Shivering in Star River. Out past the sleepless
Boundaries, tigers take new territory.
Some day oh daughter, resting next to me
You will hear the breath of the man
Who will die. One day, not today, you will see
In my eyes finally the glance of a person
Who will not live forever as I saw once
In my father’s gaze, still piercing
But unable to break a veil of loneliness miles
Away where his wife sat up suddenly
Remembering only his name and not
Those of her sons or daughters. As I heard in her
Breath of resignation one day when words
Would not come and the unsayable sentence
Dropped over her head like a hangman’s hood.
But not this breath. Though for several years
I have heard it in my own breathing
Or seen it in the eyes studying me in the depth
Behind the mirror, I will keep these from you
As long as I can. And someday, not today,
When you see them you will say nothing,
Thinking surely you did not hear what you heard
Or saw what you saw. But I will know, though
I will already have begun to forget why.
The poem grows out of the words like a weed.
It does not recognize the borders of letterforms.
Your voice is the sound of your hands finding me
In a dream. Creating my body as they go.
The poem’s tendrils wind over and around each other
Always in a clockwise motion, like time.
Each reader is a rainfall on a spring night.
The words are not gone but are forgotten.
Even the green tangle is ignored
For the flowers floating like open hands.
Each reader is an insect, on a busy mission.
Will they come away with something?
The reader stops and looks at her hands.
She rubs them together, and a word comes to mind.
Our fingers weave silence like the hands on a piano
before they touch the keys. The music held complete, waiting.
Over what instrument do we hover? Whose song?
It sprouts like corn in a field. The summer sound of growth.
On the edge of the song I find an old tree
And a treehouse. Lights twinkle inside.
I am building a stone wall at the trunk, New England style,
Piling loose slab upon slab, spending hours on the balance
Of space and solid. Grave and strong. It will never fall!
You walk out of the song and step over it.
The monster in the lake only wants to be in the lake.
The monster in the sky over the ridge wants only to fly.
There is nothing to be gained in gathering the net
Or by pulling the kite string. They are already yours.
*
An oily beast. Strand to lock. Radiant and remaining.
A drum beneath the water. No, it is the drumming in our ears
As the plane lands. The sky naga takes us on its back
And brings us slowly to earth and we wake in separate beds.
*
Want a monster in Loch Lake.
Ridge monster is flying all over the sky,
Is contained in the web
Or pulling off the line. They already know.
*
-JSS
The week lays before us like a red ladder on the floor.
While it seems to point forward it is going in the wrong direction.
What can I lean it against that will let me climb up to you?
–sometimes the present has no leverage!
The black belt looks at his watch.
For a long time he does not move.
He is like a pen hovering over a blank page–
The shadow is written first.
*
There is an art to flying across the days
To reach out without holding on.
The will, like a migratory pattern, synced
To wingbeats, weather and hunger.
Before we knew what we were
We knew where we were going.
On the ground below, at the site next door
A worker rests his ladder against the wrong house.
*
And here we are now. Like hands on a watch.
Atoms that can get no closer no matter what we do.
In the quiet do-jang, the students disperse like birds.
The music from the mall hesitates at the entrance
And slinks away. The black belt has seen enough,
He covers his watch with his sleeve and turns us
Into a form of silence and motion. Like words
That could save someone’s life, or kill them.
Nobody can sleep in a room in the renovated hotel’s fourth floor
because the lovers have not left. The businessman before dinner
finds the sheet thrown to the foot of the bed and before he knows
what he is doing he is stepping over jeans, socks, a bra, a colorful
dress that smells of flowers and wine, none of which can be seen
with the eye, but the businessman has seen love before, he has spent
many nights in rooms like this and he respects the lovers.
He does not remake the bed. He hangs his jacket on the chair
and lies face down on the open bed, absorbing the singular scent.
He cannot sleep, the bed is too busy, he hears breathing
and the ascent of a name new on her lips. The wind moans outside
Because it would like to lay quietly across a small landscape
The size of a sheet and rest, too. The man wipes a tear, gets up.
Later, over dinner, he makes the biggest deal of his career.
A fleet of winter flowers
Sails out over the brown ocean
To war. None will come back
But their song is light.
*
When a thing grows where we think
it shouldn’t, we have misunderstood
Its nature, or the environment
It grew in, or both.
*
Tell me about the mountain stream,
Cloud chasing cloud like a fleet
Of winter flowers. A song as light
As rain has reached our roots.
The soul embarks on its journey.
Nobody is there to wave it goodbye
Or wish it safe passage. Yet it looks back.
The soul feels it is traveling in circles.
The passage is both long and short
Because it is the soul that is growing,
Not the journey,
Blossoming outward like a sphere
Where for the outermost edge the journey
Is the longest and only gets longer
Until looking back it sees itself
Waiting for its arrival at the beginning.
Who is that standing by you, laughing?
Translations from the English 