Two cheeks of cheese for Anpan-man,
a lettuce leaf for a cape.
Dividing rooms for privacy, tatami
rolls as white as rice— The edamame
are reclusive, and the cherry
tomatoes incorrigible flirts.
In response to Via Negativa: New Sun Rising.
Comforter
Panicked by the headlights, the cottontail turned back at the last second. My two-ton vehicle barely registered the thump under the right front tire. I am become death, destroyer of rabbits, I muttered. The rest of the way home I avoided looking at my hands gripping the wheel, so pale & fleshy. But when I left the car in its dark house of concrete & walked downhill to mine, the crisp night air tasted only of moon.
A few hours later, I was awoken by a slight vibrating of the mattress, followed by the touch of small clawed feet on the back of my head. I had become not death but a speed bump for mice running along the gap between headboard & quilt — a comforter stuffed with the breast feathers of geese.
…there is no end to the kindness of this world
For the worm in the breast is still, though the slug
beneath the stone may have shredded the leaf to lace—
For the square of grass has brightened gradually
in the sun, and the smell of burnt toast and coffee
mingles with the morning air— For the jellyfish
stabbed more than fifty times in its petri dish
has miraculously come back to life,
for the aging scientist to feed by hand—
For paper lanterns have lifted into the sky,
tiny fires ablaze in their bellies, allowing a sea
of faces to look straight up into the dark— For our
tired feet and fumbling fingers, uncertain hearts,
our clumsy, uncombed foliage: the only flags we know
to hoist with the halyard each anointed day.
In response to thus: no end to the kindness of this world.
Two Kinds of Boxes
A black box originally meant a coffin. A light box was a bed for waking up in or a garden full of unmarked snow. The black box would be opened & its contents subjected to ritual examination — a kind of haruspicy to divine the past. We would stand around making small talk in the presence of the dead & see what made their eyelids twitch. The light box couldn’t be opened because on closer inspection, it turned out to include everything. To examine its contents, you started with yourself.
Thanks to John Miedema and Rachel Rawlins for the inspiration.
Hinge
Within the labyrinth,
the grain of wood
runs counter to
the energy of
the sun;
so I work
to dream the voice
of water unspooling
its sacred thread,
leaping toward a door
open in a distant world.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
If only the wind now dresses the trees
in leaves, it’s time to clap two
pieces of wood together.
Keep an eye on the fire, raising both
hands over your head; turn one knee out
while resting the sole of the foot
on the inside of the calf. Imagine
what it takes to stay breathing like that,
how to store up heat for a whole season.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Pavor Nocturnus
All night, he said, I’d thrashed and snarled
thick bits of indecipherable language through
clenched teeth; and even after he’d shifted
my unconscious, evidently dreaming body
into another position, whatever its source
would start me up again— In the morning,
limbs aching as if from deep muscle strain,
I tell him I’m still trying to remember,
reluctant to name the same old ghosts
that have come here again to haunt me—
First, the boy my mother hired from down
the street to cut the grass and scrub
the floors, and how he slit gladiolus stems
and yellow snapdragon throats in the garden
from boredom, before turning to me to say
he’d show me how to play doctor; then,
not long after, the uncle whose unexpected
fingers broke into my afternoon naps—
How could you remember something like this,
they said to me years later, implying lies,
invention, refusing to believe a three-
year-old could come to such swift understanding
of how something could untether from the body
suspended within a bathroom’s cold white tile,
climb up the wire dangling the lone light bulb,
out the window, past the twisting trees
to where the thin, high notes of some
small bird beat through the air—
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Canción sin fin
“Paciencia y barajar.” (Patience and shuffle the cards.)
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote
Open certain books, and windmills
become giants, most certainly arrived
to take over or worse, defile the earth.
Since no one else apparently sees
the impending danger, you have to be the one
to don your suit of armor, fix the brass
washbasin on your head, hoist the pennant
of your dirty dishrag— Turn the ignition
of your trusty, pre-owned chariot and ride
through fields of goldenrod drying in late
winter light, as birds scatter cryptic
messages in the air. And who’s to say
this isn’t the waking world, after all?
The stakes remain the same: beneath
its newfangled disguises, love; honor,
in a world where it grows harder
to tell the nobleman from the thief.
The story that knighted you, the song
you were given, that you have
to keep trying to sing.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Necessity
Nothing went to waste:
sweetened skins from gourds,
pickled rinds as edible
scherenschnitte. Their seeds,
sprinkled with salt and roasted
on a tray— we cracked them
between our teeth while gossiping
on Sunday afternoons. We snipped
every last button from shirts
rubbed thin at the elbows,
and saved them like coins
in jars. I loved best the ones
covered with lattice strips
of leather— each nubbed
surface, a little luxury.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Educational Films
In elementary school, sometimes we would drop everything & watch movies in the middle of a slow afternoon, old educational films from Coronet, Encylopedia Brittanica & Disney. My favorites were the ones with time-lapse photography. A great boat would take shape in minutes as scaffolding expanded like notebook doodles & workers leapt & swarmed as quick as thought. Or the classic: the wonder of a bud becoming a bloom, shedding its petals & swelling into a fruit.
Most educational of all were the rare occasions when the teacher would decide to feed the film back through the projector as she rewound it, so that everything went backwards at high speed. The law of gravity was replaced by the law of levity. We laughed & laughed as raindrops rose from puddles & cars sped through intersections in reverse gear without a single crash. You had to pay attention; everything happened so fast. I saw an oak shrink, furl its first green flags & curl up, the acorn closing around it like a healed wound. I saw a collapsed building rise from the dead, bullets return to their guns like homing pigeons & an ashen cloud condense & give birth to a bomb.