Amy Uyematsu

to end with nothing is something Suvan Geer or to rephrase a popular Billy Preston song, “somethin’ from nothin’ is somethin’” I everyone loves the disappearing coin. a bird pulled from an empty hat. the comfort of trusting a magician’s hands. when we know we’ll get some- thing from what he takes away. II the student’s assignment— concentrate on nothing for fifteen minutes a day. she tries to empty her head but can’t figure out how. after all, she doesn’t know what nothing sounds or looks like, and the teacher won’t give the slightest clue. yet she’s got a good hunch the exercise might quiet all that shriek and clatter trapped between her ears. so like a good pupil, she devotes an entire year searching for nothing. some days she’s as still as a stone, but can’t escape the distractions of river and wind, footsteps approaching, birds calling in the trees overhead. or closing her eyes, she’ll focus on a cloudless blue sky. pillows and planes and purple sunsets keep interrupting. she silently repeats words like ocean or why, chants sounds that dwell low in her throat like maah and uhmm. at year’s end her teacher asks if she’s found nothing. she tells him she’s found everything but nothing. he smiles,you’recloser than you think

can go to Bible study every Sunday and swear she’s still not convinced, but she likes to be around people who are. We have the same conversation every few years—I’ll ask her if she stops to admire the perfect leaves of the Japanese maple she waters in her backyard, or tell her how I can gaze for hours at a desert sky and know this as divine. Nature, she says, doesn’t hold her interest. Not nearly as much as the greens, pinks, and grays of a Diebenkorn abstract, or the antique Tiffany lamp she finds in San Francisco. She spends hours with her vegetables, tasting the tomatoes she’s picked that morning or checking to see which radishes are big enough to pull. Lately everything she touches bears fruit, from new-green string beans to winning golf strokes, glamorous hats she designs and sews, soaring stocks with their multiplying shares. These are the things she can count in her hands, the tangibles to feed and pass on to daughters and grandchildren who can’t keep up with all the risky numbers she depends on, the blood-sugar counts and daily insulin injections, the monthly tests of precancerous cells in her liver and lungs. She’s a mathematical wonder with so many calculations kept alive in her head, adding and subtracting when everyone else is asleep.

based on photographs from Rural Japan: Radiance of the Ordinary /afloat two boats with no riders still moving on water the hulls barely touching each with a single oar safely propped so it won’t fall /lotus leaves close into themselves at night on their wide folded backs water beads inside, their sleeping flowers /inside do the carp just below the water’s stillness see the pines /fall daikon just pulled from the soil these pungent roots hang from bamboo poles their white tubed bodies bend as if slightly aroused each ripe radish will be drenched in salt then eaten raw all winter /lone pine ancient tree with so many tongues how long this throated stem this stillness before rain

So by sixteen we move in packs learn to strut and slide in deliberate lowdown rhythm talk in a syn/co/pa/ted beat because we want so bad to be cool, never to be mistaken for white, even when we leave these rowdier L.A. streets— remember how we paint our eyes like gangsters flash our legs in nylons sassy black high heels or two inch zippered boots stack them by the door at night next to Daddy’s muddy gardening shoes.