Category: Dying
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On reading “Hearing a Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang by Li Bai (Li Po)”
Thinking of my old home and garden, I break into a hundred thousand shards of mirror, not quite identifiable, but not yet lost. They lay there blinking partial, shifting images as the moon paces above in its forgetting path. Shall I piece them together? Is it time? Is it possible? I am sunk. If I…
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Jackson Heights, 1982
i It is time to write to you, I realize looking up from a book as my husband tells me we are running late. But you are long gone, familiarly gone. Is it a defense mechanism to say that we never should have been friends, me with my Cloisters and flannel pjs, you with your…
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Another poem about a rose
It hangs there still in the cold December air having bloomed late, and now unable to set seed. I had thought it a thing of hope when it first bloomed, white, stubborn. The dog does not follow me downstairs at this hour, her joints sore, orientation off. Alone in the gray night, uncertain in the…
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Book of changes, ii
The after-silence opened early that December morning (sometimes it comes as a surprise and sometimes expected, they say). We stepped into it on your last gasp (ready or not, dreaming or not) and as you were dropped into the ground (the splash of water, the frosty breath). We stood shaped (sent forth, novel, unprotected, planned,…
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Book of changes, i
The sun was bright today, but not enough to keep the lanterns lit tonight. Bare tree branches in tangled knots streak the black blue sky, scraping the air as they sway. If I had thought to prepare, it would not strike so hard that we will spend months waiting for a new set of leaves…
Poems from in between 