Poemunity — your poem community

And what about this boulder, knocked off the moutaintop and tumbled down a thousand years ago to lodge against the streambank, does it waste itself with worry about how things are going to turn out? Does the current slicing around it stop itself mid- stream because it can't get past all it's left behind back at the source or up in the clouds where its waters first fell to earth? And these trees, would they double over and clutch themselves or lash out furiously if they were to discover what the other trees really thought of them? Would the wind reascend into the sky forever, like an in-drawn breath, if it knew it was fated simply to sweep the earth of windlessness, to touch everything and keep nothing and be beheld by no one?

We are not sitting in the train anymore as passengers with different destinations you pulled me off at your station and I pulled you off at mine here we stand each in the other’s light and are mistakable Translated from the German

The hummingbird hovers over bougainvillea, darting in and out of blossoms as the bride throws her corset among laughter and waving hands. Seeing you, glass in hand, sunlight piercing the punch bowl’s crystal, I remember the horse, an Appaloosa, the white and gray markings like clouds, cumulus, one later on his grave, the 2X4 cross with name above a swell of land that could bring a man to his knees, or make him look up at fumbling shapes, cotton-fumed and slow. I can hear the screeching still.The colt had grabbed a turkey nesting in scrub oak, and prancing, shook it in his mouth as we ran reaching toward black feathers—then the fine spray of blood—until beyond adrenaline we began laughing,

All day the ravens shit the buck whitetail back onto his antlers, the thick arcing tines graffitied with undigested tendons. Coyote- dragged, draped in a squawking garment that rises tattered when redtail-harried — revealing ribs, links of spine, tongue-clean sockets — and falls, in patches, back, stitched with wingsound. A feathered hush. Says you will go down in the dirt. First the four-leggeds ferrying your shape across the slough, yipping nothing resembling a name, large birds then like lamp-drawn moths, before the six-limbed elders arrive as one mind, as shifting soil, to polish what’s left, forsaking only the inedible brain.

Roofers scrape the scaly lid of an auto shop beside the house where I live. Where I live shirtless men tear at the black scabs of a roof's old flesh, toss scraps into the back of a truck parked in the lot next to a house where I live. Where I live a tarp rattles at night, plastic rustles, and trash is kicked along pavement by wind. Roofers curse and shell the tire shop's peeling lid beside the house where I live. Where I live a tarp shakes all night; cans land on pavement, tossed from windows of cars that blur by where I live. Where I live windows are ladled red with light your sun leaves me with. Repairs are made to roofs which will never cover me. As I read the road between us, tire tracks unscroll their tawdry calligraphy. Any day now you shall arrive, roar into my eye with your mountainside. Where I live when I live where landscape cannot survive you.

Some day, I think, there will be people enough In Froxfield to pick all the blackberries

I had heard the story before about the two prisoners, alone in the same cell, and one gives the other lessons in a language. Day after day, the pupil studies hard— what else does he have to do?—and year after year they practice, waiting for the hour of release. They tackle the nouns, the cases, and genders, the rules for imperatives and conjugations, but near the end of his sentence, the teacher suddenly dies and only the pupil goes back through the gate and into the open world. He travels to the country of his new language, fluent, and full of hope. Yet when he arrives he finds that the language he speaks is not the language that is spoken. He has learned a language one other person knew—its inventor, his cell-mate and teacher. And then the other evening, I heard the story again. This time the teacher was Gombrowicz, the pupil was his wife. She had dreamed of learning Polish and, hour after hour, for years on end, Gombrowicz had been willing to teach her a Polish that does not and never did exist. The man who told the story would like to marry his girlfriend. They love to read in bed and between them speak three languages. They laughed—at the wife, at Gombrowicz, it wasn’t clear, and I wasn’t sure that they themselves knew what was funny. I wondered why the man had told the story, and thought of the tricks enclosure can play. A nod, or silence, another nod, consent—or not, as a cloud drifts beyond the scene and the two stand pointing in different directions at the very same empty sky. Even so, there was something else about the story, like teaching a stunt to an animal—a four-legged creature might prance on two legs or a two-legged creature might fall onto four. I remembered, then, the miscarriage, and before that the months of waiting: like baskets filled with bright shapes, the imagination run wild. And then what arrived: the event that was nothing, a mistaken idea, a scrap of charred cloth, the enormous present folding over the future, like a wave overtaking a grain of sand. There was a myth I once knew about twins who spoke a private language, though one spoke only the truth and the other only lies. The savior gets mixed up with the traitor, but the traitor stays as true to himself as a god. All night the rain falls here, falls there, and the creatures dream, or drown, in the lair.

Frosty, green through gray rising steeply, top of the bank a big top, red with a sign, misty, fantastical on the walk to school. “My sister can’t express herself properly. Imagine if those performers were stuck in their caravans forever. If round the back of the big top the doors were locked. That’s her. She’s a trapeze artist, lion tamer, cramped clean-faced clown drinking tea, practicing tricks, movement through frosted windows. Language is her caravan on bricks, with tiny little windows in.” At the weekend he and his sister stood on the frosty bank beside his metaphor. She read the poster carefully, got them sat down in good time and at the back. The trapeze artist, lion tamer, freshly-made-up clown filled the top with a noise he could go on translating forever. Walking home she opened her chest: “I liked the mime best.”

Locate I love you

At fifteen, my father ran away from his widowed mother to fight the Japanese. “I’ll come back with a PhD and serve my country with better English and knowledge,” I pledged at the farewell party in Beijing. Home — 家 —Jia: a roof under which animals live. When asked where I’m from, I say “Weihai,” even though nobody knows where it is, even though I’ve never been to the place. He lost his left ear in a bayonet fight with a Japanese soldier. Two years later, American cannons split his eardrums. The night I arrived at JFK, the Mets won the World Series and the noise on the street went on till dawn. I got up and went to work in my sponsor’s antique shop in Manhattan. The bag lady stopped her cart on the busy street and peed onto a subway grate. “Did you jump or fly?” asked my landlady from her mah-jongg table. Then she laughed and told me that her husband had jumped ship ten years ago. When he opened his fifth Chinese takeout, he bought her a passport and flew her to Queens. The only thing he liked to talk about was his old home, Weihai, its plump sea cucumbers and sweet apples, men with broad shoulders, thick thighs, and girls with long braids making steamed bread. “Back home, I had no money, but I never felt poor,” she said, shivering behind her fruit stand. “Here, if my money goes down below four figures, I panic.” She scanned the snow-covered streets of Chinatown. “I guess I really don’t want to be homeless here.” I hired the babysitter when she mentioned her hometown was Weihai. The president visited the rice paddies in Vietnam where a pilot had been downed thirty-three years ago. My father tried to return to Weihai after his discharge from the Navy. With his rank, he could find work only in a coal mine town nearby. My mother refused to go. He went alone, and got sick with TB. Mother ordered me to date the county administrator’s son so he could help father come home. “No, I’m not sad.” The street kid shook her head. “How can I miss something I’ve never had?” On her sixtieth birthday, my grandma went home to die, sailing from the island to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Yantai, then two buses to Weihai. I carried her onto the big ship at the Shanghai Port, down to the bottom, where she’d spend three days on a mattress, on the floor, with hundreds of fellow passengers. “How are you going to make it, Grandma?” I asked. She pulled out a pair of embroidered shoes from her parcel and placed them between my feet. “My heart and liver, come to 老家 soon, before it’s too late.” House — 房 —fang: a door over a square, a place, a direction. He never lost his accent, never learned Mandarin or the island dialect. Weihai, a small city in Shandong Province, on the coast of the North China Sea, a home, where my grandfather and his father were born, where my grandma married, raised her children, and now lies in the yam fields, nameless, next to her husband, an old frontier to fend off Japanese pirates, a place I come from, have never seen. It’s my 老家lao jia, old home. Back from America, my mother furnished her home on the island, bought an apartment in a suburb of Shanghai, and is seeking a third one in Beijing. “A cunning rabbit needs three holes,” she wrote to us, demanding our contributions. They swore, before boarding the ship, that they’d send money home to bring more relatives over; in return, they were promised that if they died, their bodies would be sent back home for burial. I drink American milk — a few drops in tea. I eat American rice — Japanese brand. Chinese comes to me only in dreams — in black-and-white pictures. My mother buried her husband on the island, where he lived for forty years. Room — 屋 —wu: a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination. We greet a stranger with “Where are you from?” When we meet a friend on the street, we say, “Where have you been? Where are you going?” 家 — a roof under which animals live 房 — a door over a square, a place, a direction 屋 — a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination — my tangled roots for old home.