if the wheat does not die, what do we reap?

last night, as the light's sediment settled
in the opaque glass of twilight,
i remembered when we spread out the map
of existence, planning a path to the sun.
i thought love was an
undying flower planted in the soil of life
or a living song like an eloquent bird in the heart.

but last night as the stars gathered around
the maternal moon, i heard poetry crying
in a baby carriage as the mist dimmed its eyes.
midnight was like the sleeve of an arm-less man--
empty, dark, and long.   dawn came and stood on
one leg in the pond like a blue heron.

i believe there was one night you were mine,

like a drugged butterfly on a bed of coals
or a rose beckoning in the fading twilight
as a golden star fallen from the sky.
the clock was singing a moss-grown dirge
and a poem watched the mountaintops
tinted by the sun;

in between was an insurmountable distance.

yesterday the long white hair of the snow
had grown over the collar of dawn.  when i
walked out, i left a line of tracks
that were slightly pigeon-toed.
my silk nightgown, too long for me,
trailed on the ground
in the wet snow.
my hair was in long braids.
perhaps i looked like a small clown,

or a poor little match girl, or a warrior
returning from a strange dream.
perhaps i have finished carving deep
wrinkles like valleys into my
aging trust.  maybe i have lingered too long
in the burnt embers of a summer fire
on the mountain of my heart.
perhaps i look unladylike
and immature, like an uncouth orphan.
when and where was i ever prepared
for this life?  perhaps it is better after all
that you never came here to dwell

in this museum of sad delights
and intimate fantasies. perhaps
you would have made my transparent life
opaque with your secret,
inscrutable desires.  perhaps
you require a fairy tale maiden,
clear-eyed and coy with hair
as pure as silk and skin like jade,
shaping her beautiful obeisance
with small hands
that are sometimes clever and refined,
and sometimes firm and fitted to a gun,
according to your whim and will.

perhaps your seemingly authentic love
was like the wind-blown
waves across a ferry's bow, an inconstant
surface of reflection, shaped by need
and self-delusion.  perhaps
outward appearance is no indication
of virtue within. perhaps my tales
of trying days were a way of pleading
for you to never do what you have done...

i , too, have crossed that river of dreams
searching for the unknown antidote
to my life.

when i woke one day to find you beside me
it was reason enough
for me to have endured all that came before you.

now you are gone

there are boxes in the closet
that are filled
with life's selected tangibles.

there is clothing fashion has outgrown,
and there are photographs of people who are
no longer living;

there are crumbs of moments
never fully consumed, and
there's an old cell phone

that contains the last text
i ever got from you; the one you sent
when you abandoned me,

but there are also older texts
that say, i love you
unconditionally--

messages preserved forever
like a dried fish
hanging in a window, casting

a long shadow
on every one of my days.
i have considered sealing the boxes

and shipping them to the past,
walled with dents
from all my violent hours of grief...

but some day, i may open those boxes
with all the memories they contain
and unpack only the love,
that was once so beautiful,

for the coldest years ahead

there are miracles that happen.
from the silences
in the glass caves of my ears,
from my crippled tongue,
from my mute, wet eyelashes,
that waited through years of winter,
i believed
that silence was safe,
golden like sunset,
that solitude
was expedient.

i was soft and flammable as tallow,
words peeled from me
like slivers of yellow flame,
or vats of boiling water
emerging from my coldest bluest veins.

so what if the scent of flowers
still flowed into my pores?
so what if my body was a woman's
soft-breasted slopes, yielding warm
mornings and desires
throbbing like the sea?

somehow my face
must have betrayed me,
my body loud with hollows to be filled,
my loneliness like leaves
shining on the rough edges of my poetry,
mirrors removed from my rooms
like temptations to vanity.

my dreams honed the blade
of my pen, my unused love
as noisy as the opening of irises.

wounds kept my lips pinned by nails,
my love coffined. but you exhumed my heart
to claim me. don't give up, you said,
love is better than tears.
so i spill these words:

there are miracles that happen
and everything is made visible--
longings lush like wet furrows,
oceans bearing us toward imagined riches.
love breaking through silences

and my soul has become transparent
like glass, revealing a garden
of color and song.  i hear everything
and i am in awe--

your love is beautiful

i think spring has finally arrived here
a willow brush paints a watercolor half-arc
of the rising sun.   daffodils are blooming
along the riverbank, where boat-like magnolia petals
soon will float along the rippling current

i used to carry a book of poetry
and pick a sprig of flowers in the willow shade
where i listened to the sound of rushing water.
now poetry is dead, flowers are lost,
and i can never find
those hours that have flown away.

how many times those days of simplicity
enter my dreams with a sad slice of setting sun
and the old farmer whose barn now is long torn down
i used to love to hear the stories of his life
but could not take away the melancholy of his evening years

now there is an endless sadness in the wind
where the river flows along the borders of the highway
i wish the water's harmonious low song
could come back unspoiled to my side
with all its sweet harbingers of summer

the past and the future
strictly guard secrets between them.
it's the same between words..
from the depths of a winter night
toward a light shining on a summer day
blended in various bottles
even feelings can't be labeled.

tentative spring is buried in layers of cloud
not long ago we had our first snow
in between you could search
a row of unfastened buttons
for a garden full of sweet berries

there are times when i feel as if,
untouched by man,
i had become pregnant
with a fawn-like child
who closely resembles you

i have written this poem,
trying to make it rhyme
with grasshoppers ,
so it would hop and vanish
in a clump of grass,

after which i would clearly hear you saying

i love you

did i mention that i closed the french doors
again?  it has turned cold.  the full pink
of the moon will appear faint
when pressed against a dim evening
in a cloudy solitude. so i will hang lanterns.

the stoop of your shoulders tells me
that for you love is heavy and
will not send you soaring up into
the sky's octaves; its song will be for you
low and lulling like tea leaves
slowly steeping color into a pot of water.

some believe that love is something you learn,
love is a duty for families of former
generations, cadenced in silent kisses,
lips pursed and dry, sleeping behind
stranded doors in beds passive
with hearts like polished stones

but my heart is a broken garden
with fistfuls of tender blooms
loud with obvious desires.  and i believe
that love exists only in the rooms
in which we find it.  modesty is a blouse
a few sizes too small for my breasts
my thighs are highways inviting
hitchhikers, missionaries, and lost lovers

i measure my rise out of childhood
by the nurturing curves of my body
even though we will never meet eye to eye
unless you are five feet two inches tall.
i will always love you this way,
like the wind, trying to move you.

thank you for stars that grow soft
after you have gone and the looking is done.
beyond the window where i sit thinking
about your departure and the emptiness that
has filled your absence, the night is stealing
away colors and light and i have hung lanterns...

i wont ask you if you want me in the innermost
part of your charted heart with my humid sighs
as you wish you could wish affection away;
the smallest of tears in your composure
holding the bed intently down as if
it were going to fly toward grief.

this is how i fall into you as if into a plot,
a ghost crackling with spectral intensity.
i hold the stones of your dreams in my hands
and they whisper their hardened tears
in a quick confession, before i release them
with a sound like a scattering of leaves

or a million doves, settling.

the path of dream turns from red
to midnight blue, a slim fragment
of an unknown end.  trees block the sun,
but bars of light travel at our feet,
as if urging us on

and we know we are dreaming but not
how long we have been asleep. memories
capture you in a languid net and deliver
you back into that dull ache

but if you reach out and feel the light,
you can decode its secret message
and it will tell you--paths always lead
out of the forest eventually
and if we walk on, there will be a return

to a time when desire was full
with its own restraint. your fingers
will choose to submit
to my deliberate stroking,
and you will laugh
at your semblance of passivity.

nothing can protect you now, not even fear

i won't write poems any more.
haven't i written enough?
i have written until my fingers are deformed
until my eyes are bleary
until my heart aches
until my friends turn grey
until my loved ones leave
and still my heart is muddled
people are still cruel
the air is still polluted
the soil is still cancerous
leaders still play politics
my poetry cant cure anything
it can only shrink
and wither
only an undying heart
awaits the rebirth of poetry
awaits a day to break
when we shall open the sky
and see unbroken blue

see love's banner waving

Footnotes to the Book of Loneliness