The left-behind branches
winch themselves silently upward,
as if released from long thought.
SHEEP
It is the work of feeling
to undo expectation.
A black-faced sheep
looks back at you as you pass
and your heart is startled
as if by the shadow
of someone once loved.
Neither comforted by this
nor made lonely.
Only remembering
that a self in exile is still a self,
as a bell unstruck for years
is still a bell.
THE DARK HOUR
The dark hour came
in the night and purred by my ear.
Outside, in rain,
the plush of the mosses stood higher.
Hour without end, without measure.
It opens the window and calls its own name in.
EVERYTHING HAS TWO ENDINGS
Everything has two endings—
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.
Before a life, air.
And after.
As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
PROTRACTOR
A window is only a window when stepped away from.
To swim in deep water should feel no different from shallow,
and yet it does.
Losses are so. Split into yellows and blues.
A child’s protractor proves it:
what begins near quickly grows far, once the lines are allowed to.
As two are in a room, then only one.
Death on one side of the clear glass,
not-death on the other.
Neither saying a word from inside the enlarging.
THE PRESENT
I wanted to give you something—
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule’s fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.
IT MUST BE LEAVES
Too slow for rain,
too large for tears,
and grief
cannot be seen.
It must be leaves.
But broken
ones, and brown,
not green.
HAIBUN: A MOUNTAIN ROWBOAT
Go for a walk on the mountain. The trail, up many wooden stairs, passes some houses. In front of one, an old man is building a boat. All summer I have watched this mountain rowboat. Like a horse in its stall, patiently waiting for evening hay, it rests on its wooden cradle. Finally, today, it is being painted: a clear Baltic blue. Horses dream. You can see this move through their ears. But the hopes of an old man spill, as waking life does, through the hands.
amid summer trees
blue boat high on a mountain
its paint scent drying
GREEN-STRIPED MELONS
They lie
under stars in a field.
They lie under rain in a field.
Under sun.
Some people
are like this as well—
like a painting
hidden beneath another painting.
An unexpected weight
the sign of their ripeness.
CHINA
Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese,
roads of magnetized air.
exactitudes matter.
Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China.
Steering hard.
Consulting the charts
the whole journey.
COME, THIEF
The mandarin silence of windows before their view,
like guards who nod to every visitor,
“Pass.”
“Come, thief,”
the path to the doorway agrees.
A fire requires its own conflagration.
As birth does. As love does.
Saying to time to the end, “Dear one, enter.”
SENTENCINGS
A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.
§
Blinded by light or black cloth—
so many ways
not to see others suffer.
§
Too much longing:
it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.
§
From very far or very close—
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.
§
As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,
we listen to the murmuring dead.
§
Any point of a circle is its start:
desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring.
§
In a room in which nothing
has happened,
sweet-scented tobacco.
§
The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents.
§
Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.
IF TRUTH IS THE LURE, HUMANS ARE FISHES
Under each station of the real,
another glimmers.
And so the love of false-bottomed drawers
and the salt mines outside Kraków,
going down and down without drowning.
A man harms his wife, his child.
He says, “Here is the reason.”
She says, “Here is the reason.”
The child says nothing,
watching him led away.
If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.
All the fine bones of that eaten-up story,
think about them.
Their salt-cod whiteness on whiteness.
IZMIR
Waking
after long travels
not recognizing the light
the windows
the calls of the birds of this place
not even your own planted roses
not knowing if this
is exhaustion
or failure
or transformation into
some changed existence
as yet
unacknowledged
like the fields
of red
and blue tulips
of stylized Izmir
painted now onto a bowl
now onto a vase
A BLESSING FOR WEDDING
Today when persimmons ripen
Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song
Today when the maple sets down its red leaves
Today when windows keep their promise to open
Today when fire keeps its promise to warm
Today when someone you love has died
or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born
or someone you will not meet has been born
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace
&nb
sp; Today, let day and dark bless you
With binding of seed and rind bless you
With snow-chill and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days
FIFTEEN PEBBLES
Like Moonlight Seen in a Well
Like moonlight seen in a well.
The one who sees it
blocks it.
Hunger
A red horse crops grass.
A black crow
delves bugs from a dirt pile.
A woman watches in envy what is so simple.
Mountain and Mouse
Both move.
One only more slowly.
The Same Words
Come from each mouth
differently.
The Familiar Stairs
How confidently
the blind
descend familiar stairs.
Only those
with something
to lose
grow timid at darkfall.
Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-Out Spoon of a Leaf
Like grief
in certain people’s lives:
as if something
still depended on the straightness of the spine.
Glass
Transparent as glass,
the face of the child telling her story.
But how else learn the real,
if not by inventing what might lie outside it?
Paint
What we see is the paint.
Yet somehow the mind
knows the wall,
as the living know death.
A History
Someone first thought it:
an ox gelded, tamed, harnessed to plow.
Then someone realized the wooden yoke could hold two.
After that, mere power of multiplication.
Railroads, airplanes, factory ships canning salmon.
Memorial
When hearing went, you spoke more.
A kindness.
Now I must.
The Cloudy Vase
Past time,
I threw the flowers out,
washed out
the cloudy vase.
How easily
the old clearness
leapt,
like a practiced tiger,
back inside it.
The Perfection of Loss
Like a native speaker
returned
after long exile,
quiet now in two tongues.
Night and Day
Who am I is the question of owls.
Crow says, Get up.
Sonoma Fire
Large moon the deep orange of embers.
Also the scent.
The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance.
Opening the Hands between Here and Here
On the dark road, only the weight of the rope.
Yet the horse is there.
THE KIND MAN
I sold my grandfather’s watch,
its rosy gold and stippled pattern
to be melted.
Movement unreparable.
Lid missing.
Chain—there must have been one–
missing.
Its numbers painted
with a single, expert bristle.
I touched the winding stem,
before I passed it over the counter.
The kind man took it,
what I’d brought him as if to the Stasi.
He weighed the honey of time.
ALL THE DIFFICULT HOURS AND MINUTES
All the difficult hours and minutes
are like salted plums in a jar.
Wrinkled, turned steeply into themselves,
they mutter something the color of shark fins to the glass.
Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.
First a jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.
RAIN THINKING
When it is finally quiet—
the loud refrigerator
still at the same time the heat is—
I hear the sound
and awaken.
Like a cat cleaning herself in the night,
or a dog opening
and closing his mouth
the way they do at times
when thinking,
as if tasting something new.
INVITATION
An invitation arrives
in the morning mail.
Before you have said yes or no,
your arms
slip into its coat sleeves,
and on your feet,
the only shoes bearable
for many days’ travel.
Unseen, the two small fawns
grazing in sun outside the window,
their freckled haunches
and hooves’ black teaspoons.
Abandoned, the ripening zucchini inside the fence.
Kraków, Galway, Beijing—
how is a city folded so lightly
inside a half-ounce envelope and some ink?
That small museum outside Philadephia,
is it still open,
and if so, is there a later train?
The moment averts its eyes from this impoli
teness.
It waits for its guest
to return to her bathrobe and slippers,
her cup of good coffee, her manners.
The morning paper,
rustling in hand,
gives off a present fragrance, however slight.
But invitation’s perfume?—
Quick as a kidnap,
faithless as adultery,
fatal as hope.
CONTENTMENT
I had lived on this earth
more than fifty years