Karen An-hwei Lee

A true friend is one soul in two bodies. —Aristotle Kant says, transcendental idealism. In Aquinas, we exist apart from bodies but only on Thursdays when his famous ox flies by the window wiser at Cologne where Albertus Magnus, his real name, appoints Aquinas to magister studentium, master of students. Aquinas is petrified but says yes. He feels his soul sailing out of his head floating near the roof where a blue ox wings by. On Wednesday, two bodies are one soul waking at sunrise thanks to the pineal gland of Descartes, who thinks this node in the brain is a tiny sugar cone or salted peanut, the seat of the soul while Aristotle points to the chopping ax as a teleology as if the ax were a living, breathing person which it isn’t. Heraclitus, air and fire while Aquinas objects, no not an ax but ox. If you’re a bird or soul I am only one mile from the sea. If you are a soul in two bodies life is more complex and we must labor twice the field of sorrow after sleep, bath, and a glass as Aquinas whispers,the things we love tell us who we are

Questions for a zoologist starting with anatomy concluding with love: Is a turtle’s skin loaned? True or false: weight of his shell is lighter than the light of drums. What is the under-shell and is it tough as a mangrove? Can he see through his shell-box? Can he see out the rear to this sea of ours? Does he exist in the order of things? How does life begin, when does it end and is that good or evil? Yellow margin over a cuttlebone, domed carapace is it a lonely world of sow bugs, cutworms, and God?

On the other side of this door You are an oyamel native to the mountains of Mexico Rising in a cloud forest of sister evergreens Shedding pollen cones, shedding winged seeds Our lost wings singly and in pairs. This is why the monarchs vanish Raising sienna-hued colonies longer than my arms Hibernating in Mexico where it’s hotter in January than my front yard, where the red bougainvillea raves And magnolias             with a mauve rush on paper And open as though thinking about last year’s novels Read over the shoulders of garden-strollers Obey the apostle’s exhortation And do everything in love.

After I turned forty, I received my first 42 millirem dose of X-rays. I heated the machine with my uncupped body, tabled my rib cage to cool shoulders dear as a beloved relative who could no longer see due to intraocular weather in her eyes. Women in an outer room awaited bone scans. Backscatter is 5 microrems or .005 millirems. A dental bitewing X-ray, around 0.5 millirem. Mammogram, 40 to 70. Do not know about bone scans. Annual background radiation is 300, higher if we live on a mesa or often fly. Ozone plus uranium decay, daughters of radon gas. How about our radiogenic thyroids, butterflies shimmering with table-salt iodine? Peonies of  bone marrow spun rails of flesh in a waiting room of  jacquard chairs, of  round mirrors and water lilies, paper hydrangeas, African violets. If  I broke the silence, then I drew the flame of  your sun into my chest. Unshielded, I entered an inner room to don a rose-colored cotton kimono. For a minute, I thought of  flying fish roe and forgot its  Japanese name. What is the risk of carcinogenic harm while estrogen acts on my cells? Coralline of  the radiology room inside my mouth, the clinical air exuded an odor of magnolia powder although no one wore it, a scent riper than radical scavengers of  blackberries. I uttered a prayer of radiolucence then remembered the word,tobiko.

Every half century, the synchronous flowering of bamboo causes famine in parts of India. May we blossom every fifty years without afflicting the people. May our seedpods nourish rodents who roam our groves without rebuking lands with famine. May sweet potatoes and rice save us. May ginger and turmeric flourish to the bitter distaste of rats while tresses of bamboo flowers changeling white wasps load the groves with seed in rare perennial synchrony. May our sisters flower en masse hundreds of square miles apart in the pale night. May our shoots pray a silent vision of healing, our rhizome-laden memories: Yes, we share our hunger only once on this earth, my love. Let us bless our fruit and multiply.

One example of hierophany is the apparition of angels. This is a new word I overheard this morning. It occurs when the divine realm manifests — or the word intrudes — into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profane is another way to say this. I asked whether it is a hernia, and the answer was no. A herniated condition is viscera on viscera — a disc, organs, the skin, or nerves. Besides, such a comparison would be profane. A figure of speech already exists, I said, in a hieratic silence of cursive writing long ago dead. Not long ago, those two phrases dwelled in separate worlds. I dare you to use the word hernia in a poem, said a friend. So I not only used the word, I invited God into language. Or God existed before language, while God is also the word. Remember, all theophanies are forms of  hierophany. However, the converse is not always true — not all hierophanies are theophanies — or God visible in our world.

In a new translator’s version of Genesis, there’s no Adam. No serpent. In paradise, I don’t bleed. Fig leaf-free girl, dear God, I say as we converse fluently without tongues, joined as two spice-drenched beloveds in a song of songs, could we please ask the gardener to plant a pomegranate grove by a stand of non-fruiting olive cultivars, which don’t bloom and aren’t so messy?

In prayer: quiet opening, my artery is a thin shadow on paper— margin of long grass, ruderal hair, sister to this not yet part of our bodies your lyric corpus of seed in rough drafts of pine ash, chaogao or grass calligraphy in rough drafts of pine ash— your lyric corpus of seed not yet part of our bodies: ruderal hair, sister to this margin of long grass, shadow on paper, my artery is a thin quiet opening in prayer.