James Masao Mitsui

The sky wants the water to turn grey, but if I notice how waves play with the clumps of yellow flags, or the way turtles share logs, or even try to understand a friend’s decision to walk onto a glacier and end her life—I will be ready for any poems that have been waiting. The horizon opens as I walk, escorted by swans and Canada geese. I need to stop backpedaling into the present. In my old life people would straighten the truth, but the river flows in curves. The names of my father and my mother rest next to each other in Greenwood Cemetery. The distance between me and the mountains measures an uneven thought: I feel like an orphan. An early moon is just a piece of change in the softening sky. Light is such an actress. Time to seek Hopper’s wish to simply paint sunlight on the wooden wall of a house. I am growing older.Maru in Japanese means the ship will make it back home.

—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is morning even though the iron cell is in a basement with no windows. In the center of the painting the devil blows a whistle and his pitchfork drips blood. Above in the night a man has taken off in a Buck Rogers spaceship heading for a yellow one-eyed moon. He grips the steering wheel in the open cockpit and doesn’t look back. In a lower corner under a naked tree a satyr sits and plays his pan-flute. The notes weave all around the painting, twist around a girl dancing in veils. The man who dreams all this pulls at his covers, drowses at the bottom of the painting. The man who painted this died in his dreams.

—after Frank O’Hara You have been smiling across the table at your date with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth. You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup. In your next life you will be a teacher and no one will ever call you by your first name. After your next vacation you will come home and discover that your neighbors have redecorated in the style of Iowa trailer court. If you feel like you’re getting old, secretly plant zucchini in your neighbor’s flowerbeds. Avoid people who iron their sheets or roll their socks & underwear. Painting and poetry and music will show us where we should be going, not the senate or tv news. The next thermos bottle you see will actually be a listening device made in Korea. All the people in this restaurant are glad that they are not you.

—for James I. Ina 1. The emotion of trucks, buses & troop trains brings them here, to the wrong side of another state. A woman at the Klamath Falls depot calls it the wrong side of the ocean. 2 Crumbs hide around the table legs in the mess hall, dishes & silverware clink a strange song. Families talk across long tables. Questions drop like puzzles to the unfinished floor. 3 Blocks away from their new home a woman finds a latrine not backed up. Stands in line, waiting her turn in the wind. Down the center of the open room: 12 toilet stools, six pair, back to back. Sits down and asks for privacy, holding a towel in front of her with trembling hands. 4 In a North Dakota prisoner-of-war camp, surrounded by Germans & Italians, a quiet man hammers a samurai sword from scrap metal at night in a boiler room. A secret edge to hold against the dark mornings. He sends love notes to his pregnant wife in Tule Lake sewn in pants mailed home for mending. His censored letters mention a torn pocket. She finds the paper near the rip, folded & secret in the lining. White voices claim the other side of the ocean is so crowded the people want to find death across the phantom river. Headlines shake their nervous words. Out on the coast beach birds print their calligraphy in the sand. It is such a small country.

I am ten. My mother sits in a black rocking chair in the parlor and tells stories of a country school surrounded by ricefields and no roads. I stand in the kerosene light behind her, earning my allowance. A penny for each white hair I pull.