If the price were the moon,
And thus nights without silver trees
And bluish streams haunted by fireflies,
Winter afternoons glowing with a rising planet,
Octobers with geese flying heard but unseen,
Still I would have you place your head on my shoulder,
To caress your long curls, your brow and cheek,
To feel the ribs of your knitted sweater,
To hear your deep breaths speak of
A world very different from the waking world,
Those tales of chases and minotaurs —
To see your smile when even asleep
You feel my gaze.

January 3rd, 2008

Is it not enough that
The dolphin on his silver back
Carries the heaving sea?
Must he also bear the sins of Carthage?

Must the weeping mother
Before her son’s sepulcher
Grow old awaiting the angel
Who will roll away the capstone?

The mother watches her living son
Cling to footholds and niches of the cliff,
His fingers searching for a crack,
Sweat pouring from his pate.
Why doesn’t he hammer a pin
Into the rock face,
Attach a rope,
Move safely?

She is willing to be his net:
To break his fall with her soft body,
To die saving him.

There is a song in the stone,
But it is only in the ancient stone,
Worn by running water,
That we can hear the words:

Fire made me
And I cooled on the plain,
When the moon loved the earth
And her near touch
Made the earth swell and heave.
Water wore me
And wore this winding valley.
I sit small in my stream
Watching the moon walk away.

January 9th, 2008

She sent her lover a single hollyhock,
Wrapped in paper and bound
With mizuhiki grass.

Her lover saw:
His mistress just after bathing,
Pink and perfumed,
Swathed in her white kimono,
Bound with a green sash.

January 14th, 2008

We widowers wait in our houses,
Shrunken by our wives’ souls’ flight
From this green and humid vale.
Our houses are become monuments
And our street the lane
Winding through the graveyard.
Our children’s voices, tender and faint,
Dangle at the end of a wire a continent away.
Six-mile-long Crow Island quiet now,
Once fed us food and fed America steel.
The mills rust and at night a string of lights
Warns ships in the narrow channel
To keep clear of the hulk.

We raise our heads tonight to the Moon
And watch as it grows a red crescent
At its South Pole, spreading until
We are looking upon a rusty Mars,
Then we watch a yellow crescent grow
In the south,
We watch the red fade upward,
And we are left with a red-rimmed Moon
Floating in the black night.

February 21st, 2008

When my twin daughters were little
And it was winter,
They flanked me, drawing
In my breath on the window pane.
They giggled and wiped it clear
So I could see the sun on the snow.

When my son was a boy
Scantily clad for winter,
I pretended to scold him.
He inhaled my frosty breath
And breathed it out as laughter.

My second son and I walked arm in arm
Past the mounds of ploughed snow
And my breath circled his head in a halo,
And his mine.

The procession leaves the church
And the altar boys shiver under their cassocks.
In the wan sun I can tell
From the shape of their breaths
That the hymn is in Latin.

February 29th, 2008

At harvest time they will miss my labor,
But I paint tulips with a brush
Dipped in agony.
The choir lacks my strong voice,
But I paint black tulips with a brush
Dipped in the darkness of a room with heavy drapes.
The students stare at the empty desk
And the blackboard with the half-finished sentence,
But I paint with a brush
Dipped in the smiles of my sons and daughters.
The painted plates I fire in the kiln,
Watching the colors harden and deepen.

March 15th, 2008

There you are,
Behind the first blade of grass,
In the spring snow.

March 28th, 2008

Your old heart was tired,
Having seen battlefields
And uniforms stiff with young blood,
A heart worn by worry in long lean years.
Blood laden with care is heavy,
A stone pushed uphill,
One beat at a time.
Your old heart fled to a flower,
Then to a circumpolar star,
Where it throbs leisurely
And remembers.

Your wife wove your new heart,
The way she braids challah for the Sabbath,
And it is as tender and sustaining.
Your daughters and their husbands,
Your son and his wife
Give you to drink sweet wine,
Dark and red,
To pulse in your breast,
That you may bestow your blessing.

April 11th, 2008

It feels right that today
My hands should sink into dough,
Like God’s great hands into clay,
That today I should be as dusty as a miller
And the air be redolent with anise.

One loaf is my lost son and one loaf is me,
And my husband will place us on a board
And cover us with cloth,
He will balance us on his head.

Around us the Atlas Mountains speak Tamazight:
“Yes, today I am clad in snow,
But soon, soon I will swell your streams
That you may plant wheat.”

The cobbles are uneven in the narrow alley,
But we are in good hands.
And the hands say in Tamazight:
“Now you wobble and are moist,
But when I fetch you in an hour
You will be our family’s strength.
Feel the oven’s heat,
Slide from the peel.”

The husband from far away
Reaches deep into Morocco
And his hands thank the baker.
At home on the plank table
He blesses the loaves
And they become mother and son,
Sweet as anise.
Behold our strange Eucharist!

April 24th, 2008

The planks are sawn and fitted.
Painted with tulips and blue birds:
The cradle is built and
Sways a little in the silent room,
Listening to a bee buzz about the joys
Of being smeared in pollen,
And it waits like the rich black soil,
Learns its patience, waiting
For the windborne seed,
Dreaming of birch and wild rose.

May 5th, 2008

Patch of sunlight on surface of sea,
Oval and receding,
The cord leading me into dark depths
To sea floor.
A rock of odd shape in hand
Up to the patch, now of moonlight,
Up to boat laden with queer stones,
And these I place on shore
In plain view
And watch passers-by
To read the mute stones,
Troll-like I hide myself,
The best of me strewn on beach.

July 4th, 2008

My son is now a tree
And I haul water to soak his roots
And weed the ground in his shade.
In time I will be too frail to carry water,
And I will lie awake worrying about drought,
Windstorms and clattering hail.

“My mother pours cooling water on me
And tenderly trims the grass as I shade her.
One day she will cease to come.

My bark is furrowed and grey
And everyone who knew me and loved me
Has turned to dust.

I am taller than the houses:
I see the house I was born in,
The streets I half-played,
Half-walked along to school,
The trees I swarmed over,
The branches I dangled from,
Laughing and chattering.
I see where my first body was planted
And on humid nights I buzz with locusts.
 
The birds weave nests on my limbs
And soon I am alive with chirping and hunger.
In summer the birds eat my berries
And spread my seeds in fields near and far.
In autumn I shed my scarlet leaves
And in winter I sleep like black sticks in snow.
In spring I take sunlight and rain
To make leaves and I grow taller.

My roots deep in the earth tell me
We are moving toward Europe
And one day the Atlantic will be a creek.”

July 17th, 2008

The grasslands chase the sun
Only to end at the border of the Xiong-Nu.
The horses tossing their heads snort vapor
Into the frosty air, where it hangs,
Just as my words brushed on paper
Hang on a fluttering scroll.

July 22nd, 2008

I have obeyed my father,
And here I am in a covered wagon
Jolting across the grasslands,
Our tracks far from the commerce of Empire.

Now and then the sooty smell of roasting mutton.
That odor in my hair under a pointed hood
Is my fate.
My cloak will be trimmed in appliqué
Depicting the wolf on the deer’s throat.

What will become of my little brother,
Whom I held in my arms
And smothered with kisses?
Who will sing to him
And who will watch him grow to manhood?
He will be replaced by my own half-breed child,
Who will be on horseback before he can walk,
And by my daughter who will learn the lore of witchcraft.

The sound of the flute issued from the garden pavilion
And at Zhongyuan little lantern boats floated on the stream,
And at Qingming we swept the ancestors’ graves.
No more will I awake with peach blossoms
In the folds of my gown.

Sour mare’s milk for mulberry wine,
And mid-afternoon night for lingering twilights,
Felt tent in deep snow
For my wing of the palace
Where the latest poems are sung to the lute.

As high as the clouds,
Geese with their strong wings
Beat their way south.
Tonight they will rest
In the courtyard of a temple
Where the moon will dapple their backs with silver
Beneath the ruined roof.

July 23rd, 2008

Perhaps I could have been more circumspect,
Or spoken blandly, hinting at nothing.
Perhaps I could have convinced the minister
My plan was really his and applauded his originality.

On night duty, when summoned I ran
In my heavy robes and tinkling headdress,
Bowed in the August presence and kept my counsel.
At night, in retirement, I dismiss the sleepy maid
And brew my own tea, and sing if I please.

In the future the Eastern Capital may be
Under the water of a new shore line,
Or abandoned to the encroaching desert.
Are the hills bitter for being
At the foot of the Kun Lun?
Is the Yangtze among barley and prayer flags bitter
For being a trickle,
While downstream at Nantong it is an inland sea?

July 23rd, 2008

The weaver after her weeks of toil
Only sees the pattern when she steps back
From the loom.
So it is with friends who meet after decades apart.

We laugh, each pointing to the other’s white hair,
And the little lisping boy of memory
Introduces his wife and children.
To the grandchildren’s questions I shake my head
And say I am childless, having brought no one
For them to play with.

Tables are cleared, wine brought in sealed jars.
Servants scurry and return with delicacies of the region.
A chill passes over our mirth to discover
So many youths full of pranks have become ghosts,
Who at the beginning of winter visit our dreams.

I search his son’s face for a portrait of my friend,
The impoverished candidate for the Imperial examinations.
On the porch, sipping cups of wine we sing songs
From another city, another dynasty
And in the ensuing silence the setting sun says
All there is to be said.

July 24th, 2008

It is not necessary to have visions,
But only to attend closely to this world.
My ax bites into the tree and it trembles
With the grief of the mothers
Who have lost sons to fever.

I used to dip my hands into the stream
And drink from my hollowed palms, like an animal.
The water tasted sweet and cold,
And was full of messages about trampling deer
And a sow and her farrow rooting for acorns.
Then I halved a gourd for a scoop
And drank like a human,
But the water was insipid.

The mountain air carries the scent of resin and pine cones,
Yet some evenings I smell the bodies rotting on a battlefield.
At such times I weigh more than Mount Tai.

Every rock and root, every droplet of cloud and every grain of soil
Feels the grief of sentient beings.
Because I know this, men think me wise
And seek me out.
But when they climb to my hermitage
They find the door ajar and the hut empty,
Yet far off they hear the sound of my voice,
Singing as I cut herbs.

July 25th, 2008

Your absence has the taste of bitter melon,
Yet I keep vigil for your arrival
Like a mother at her child’s bedside:
She knows being awake all night will not
Change the course of the fever,
Yet she has no recourse.

The road across the plain grows dark,
And no distant horseman raises a plume of dust.

Everything is kept in readiness —
Your favorite foods, a hot bath, soft robes.
The jars of wine stay sealed
Beside the two cups and the lute.

In a month the passes will be blocked by snow.
As the days shorten the well of hope will freeze over.

The gardener says he has planted two peach-trees,
Side by side, in a place sunny yet sheltered.
As sometimes happens, he says,
The birds favor one tree, build their nests there,
Sing from its boughs, while the other
They avoid, even the bees avoid.
It sheds leaves, withers,
And with tears in his eyes he must chop it down.

July 25th, 2008

The pines above the burning rocks shimmer,
Solid and century old, yet waving like green banners,
And in the valley below, the air just above the river vibrates,
The opposite shore twisting like paper on fire.

Pools of water seem to hover over distant roads,
And a double rainbow arcs between peaks,
Its end points indistinct.

The unseen sun reaches above the horizon
To paint early evening with red and gold,
And the sudden coolness reminds me that
Eleventh-month snow will cover my hut.

In one swish the ax splits the log
Exactly down the middle.
The two halves topple onto the grass.

July 28th, 2008

Rowing toward the shore I hope
The rain will overtake me.
On shore the water runs off
My straw hat onto
My rain cape made of bark,
Streams off my shoulders and back.
I am in no hurry to reach my cottage.

Inside, I light the oven and a lamp.
Water falls in a curtain over the window,
And I hear the puddles splashing under the eaves.

A mountain storm, sudden, rumbling,
But the room is dry, fragrant with soup.
Brushes and ink sticks beside paper,
Partly unrolled, held down by a bar of ironwood.

My home village is just another village,
My family, people whose faces are fading.
Wherever it rains, there is my home.
Raindrops are without guile or envy.
Falling around my thatched hut
They are my friends and guardians.

After the lightning flashes
The air is clean and as sweet as mown hay.

July 29th, 2008

All morning long
The cranes circle downward,
From the cold thin air
Downward gliding
To ripe millet and spikes of sorghum.

At night I hear the whoosh of wings,
Males tall and threatening
Till the call to unison is sounded
And they settle close together.
A red fox, belly low, flits
Between their stick legs,
On his way to the marsh.

At first light they rise up,
Their red hoods redder against the low sun,
And are gone, the air suddenly silent,
The space above the drooping millet empty.
I can feel the field’s sadness,
Still and alone, awaiting the harvest,
Then the first frost.

July 31st, 2008

Beyond the mountain chain:
Other lands, other tribes,
But just as rain freezes into snow and hail,
Melts into lakes and rivers,
Flows into the sea, yet is always water,
So every one of us no matter where walks
Through air dense with ghosts —
They fill our lungs, they push our ships,
They pour into our dreams,
Even the hanged sway in their breath.

The yarrow stalks clatter on the altar,
But what use divination
When the outcome is known?

August 2nd, 2008