兔年
after Victoria Chang
The omen birds are sharp
in their auspicious bands.
But my eyes are still adjusting
to the new prescription:
the old one reversed.
*
Character I confuse, quarry or ghost.
Lucky days drain their oil
on a paper towel.
*
I follow nausea’s braid
downstream. My thoughts dam
the creeks of sleep.
My mother’s warning: don’t be the poet
chasing light down a well.
*
Sometimes I scream in my head
& a little leaks onto my shoulder.
I can’t tell my voice from other voices
& other voices are always with me.
*
婆婆 could tell the future.
All it took was a hand on the stomach.
*
My selves speak different dialects
but read the same scripts.
They can never finish a sentence.
*
All my life I entered
through the back door.
How else could I have turned out?
*
No, I am not who I thought I was.
I must be the master of my mind.
*
There’s no reasoning with the past,
its feral silence.
I introduced it & it doubled
so now I must kill it.
The skin makes for a warm coat.
Symphony of a Restless Night
after Fernando Pessoa
Time crinkled like a brown bag
given to the hyperventilating.
Yet still the night was blue,
its skein unruptured,
no hand had come to drag me
into what prophesy I’d spun
from the window.
Like anyone my mouth wants
to be gentle.
Still my lover told the dispatcher
She’s screaming in agony.
The paramedic said I’d sleep it off,
spin together by morning.
Night’s right arm itches the left.
Lonely Soares wrote,
Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake.
Still I am the girl waiting
for who she should have been,
the finch
smacking against the silverware
waiting for her wings
to sprout
in a blitz of viscera.
Still I am the woman trembling
beneath the shock blanket
light shining across her eyes.
How many times has the world ended for me?
I’ve always been the same.
Nude in my devotion to elsewhere.
With my miraculous dreams.
My spinning sundial.
Zuihitsu
Once you carried me
to the end of the water,
& the infinite lake
dammed into a white room.
Then I knew paradise
is a tightening circle,
a diamondback
swallowing its rattle.
*
Sometimes I hallucinate God
is a monarchic bloodstain
down the front of my shirt.
Sometimes God spits
dip into the grass,
voracious, singular,
the look in His eye saying
there is nothing private
that cannot be slit down the stomach
for the surgical theater.
*
No cell service. No cable.
We pull each other taut
over a deck of cards.
Twilight sections your face
into light & dark meat.
You call me your feast
& then I’m the carp
nailed to the deck, releasing
the cologne of flood
onto your hands.
An ace matching an ace.
*
If I stare long enough at one point
an abyss opens at the locus
of my looking, cinching
the color around it.
Then the face your face holds
crawls forth.
*
I want a new perspective.
Hold me upside-down
by the mouth.
When the alarm pulls
its forceps along our legs,
it bruises me like a child
mourning her jarred firefly.
*
Pared down to my essential part,
what could I say about beauty:
its mutability: that I am
muscle & blood all along
like any animal crossing the reservoir,
& the forest of terrorized virgins
tells nothing to the wind
pleating their leaves—
*
Sometimes I see God: some fugitive
stepping out of the water
with six eyes & the body of a crow—
It’s true. I’m overgrown with images.
Sometimes I hallucinate.
The interior is a country
divided by a river
& a sniper on the hill.
*
I walked down the pier
& the lake stood up
more hominid than animal.
I walked down the pier
& the center of the world
is not the navel. It cannot
be pierced with a needle
or traced with the lips.
I’ve seen it touching
the closed eyes of children
praying their important prayers,
though it only touched me once,
in a line of wind that droned
like a widow pressing forehead to dirt.
I walked down the pier
& thought I could see divinity
up a column of smoke or fire,
or some human manufacture—
how do I return there—
I walked down the pier
& you will not bring it to me. I am sure.
You bring only the rigs
& that drizzling music,
pitching up
from the throat like a hand.
