Category: Memory
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The dying thoughts of a poet from Gorham’s Cave
I do not know what I should expect you to come to know as you unwrap my bones and the tissues of my belongings. I carved this mark for you, no one else, hoping it would make me known to you. But when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shines once more, it will be…
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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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My window at night, more
Slow moving, a partial dream unwinding in its own way, we slow down, we slow it down, make sure we see — look, here, now, it passes — open it, to understand, to isolate the exact point, and how, the smooth releasing shifts into jarred, frayed, jagged. We go in there, at that point, slow…
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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 