twilight
is not a time
but a quality of light
before or after darkness.

stars swim through the engulfing
emptiness--a boundless sea of promise
or of bitterness
and dream is a short hallway
with two open ends

what is illuminated
by sunlight, moonlight
or lamplight
slowly emerges from darkness :
the face of memory
with its birthmarks
and scars

there are gray threads
needling through
the dark waterfall
of memory's time-invaded hair

where is the thin line
between imagination
and truth
between instinct
and faith
between love
and indifference

leafless trees
and abandoned villages
speed through me

someone might have loved me once

 

Actually, yes.
I have moments when I forget
how beautifully you loved me;
how brutally you left me.
Actually, yes--God has abandoned me,
but the old tempestuous gods
with their thunderbolts and hurricanes
plunged through the gap in my exiled sky.

And actually, yes, I prefer them-
their ferocity and passion
rowing through the deep silence
of my ordinary life.  Above all,
I love truth and beauty--you were long
on beauty but a little short on truth.
I have cast away my useless guilt
my mother's pitiless tirades.
the road between the worlds remains open

I plow through your old emails
like an engine of tears
until I come to rest like a wet silence
trembling in every direction.
I love you. I have always loved you,
will always love you, it's just something
impractical that The Living do--this tragic passion
in which the old gods are still alive
and yes, somewhere under the hurricane,

something ancient and steady and slow
still swims steadfastly through the ocean waves
indifferent to the concept of worthiness

it's only in the dark
that i believe i can move like a silken cloth
buffing the silver moonlight
and polishing the dream i hold in my hands.

threads of light, strained through my palms,
float in the air.

dawn is a mile off to the east.
when my house gets there,
a hard edge of fire
cuts the night's restraint

and my dream thrashes
in my grasp like a moth, then vaporizes,

leaving my hands flecked with moon-dust

 

oh god, if in eternal life
we are allowed only one
extreme happiness,
please let me lie forever in my lover's arms
let us be in a little boat
floating on a moonlit sea

but the flower of experience
bears the fruit of wisdom
and the fruit of wisdom
is pregnant with the seed of sorrow

under the misty moon
i adore you for your love
that is so profound, it has become
speechless

the water in a puddle is plain
but with a touch of sunset
it turns into a sea of gold

all beings are deceived by light and shadow--
beyond our horizon,
when did the moon ever wax and wane?

the falling star
shines only when it crosses the sky of man;
it darts out from darkness
and flees into darkness again
is love also unaccountable?

it's only a lonely star
but in the infinite darkness
it has written up
all the solitude of the universe

in this poem, i have already forgotten
the first word,
nor will i ever know the last

 

every day i write this letter
and every night it comes back : sender unknown.

i recall the oranges in california,
round as breasts, early light filtered
through the palms, their dappled shade.
i remember how much easier it was to write to you
from a place that didn't know you.

my letters have been bundled and recycled
and i know that you will never read them.  the words
vanish, the paintings fade away. the gold flecks
on mulberry paper turn to ash.

on my good days,
i don't write letters asking
why the whole world has left me. on my bad days,
think of this thousand-mile
space between us as the prison wall
where i scrape out messages of desperation.

how can i choose what man
will spin shadows through my dreams
while the sheets flow around his legs
as he lifts up on his elbow to look into my face,
my thighs slippery and his chin rough with stubble?

now the moon glimmers on the clouds like
a lantern shining on the coal black water,
aloof, unreadable, a gold opalescence
shimmering to the horizon, ambiguously shifting

as  i write you this recurring letter :
in my dreams of amethyst and jade, 
memory beats against me like the sea.

i'll invent a language for longing--
longing is a subject i am used to.

 

dreaming is cloud-walking
with heavy pockets
that are stuffed with
thin-hammered gold hearts
and cicada wings,
mists, snows, celestial coordinates,
stars, bridges, mysterious shadows,
rainbows, spring rivulets, startled stars,
night-wide eyes, fingers of the wind,
and the fair side of a peach
darkened by the cruel knife of time
fading in the relentless sun

i would write this poem in chinese
but i have forgotten the character for love
and remember only the radical heart,
the vital and vestigial organs
where emotions come from
and which,
in my case
had cancer of the metaphor.

the maiden behind the curtain
is always someone's courtesan
pondering the void.
west lake is a bog
behind a hedgerow of litter
and wild thistles
a nation of frogs
fuck blissfully
trapped in their cycle.

i keep pulling those words
from my pocket
so i can write the same old poem
the best facicle
of a stupid pupil
which is not like popsicle
(which makes me think of sucking you.)

don't assume
that truth is an oxymoron
and eternity
can't be proven to the dead.
i was escorted from girlhood
to unhappiness
by several men
(don't say my boudoir is too narrow now,
i can sleep on but one cold bed)

right now i am
propped against the couch ,
computer on my lap
hands on the keyboard
white silk lace at my collarbone--
(camisole, wrists, ankles
just hindrances i would shed
if you were here)

all that is beautiful ought to bloom,
don't you agree?

i have kept the sanctity of my body
(i've had offers)
and cleanliness of dream, if not mind.
i have washed my heart of bad intentions
i have shouldered burdens
in brief moments of reprieve and splendor.

all history must step aside and grant me passage.

what is destiny but an angry wind?
or did i mean wound?

i ask for little, therefore
i get little.
(i need a taller-than-me someone to change the light-bulb
i cannot reach.)

footsteps so light, the fallow deer can't hear me
heart so heavy, you could sink a stone in my name

night will lower its black knife
(you can take that to the bank.)
only the lantern will bear witness now.
( the moon is drunk and anorexic
constantly reeling, constantly changing weight.)
the moon mourns her unwritten words
cries naked into trees and windows....

poetry is a vast orphanage
where i am waiting for the love of all loves
or waiting to unlearn ecstasy
or waiting for the dead to reawaken

i opened my eyes and you
were already within me
my thin jade bracelet shattered
into five dazzling pieces
one for each element
that makes up the stars
when you are gone i feel you again
like the rapture of the water-clock
pleasure that burns to pain that
burns into the long hours of the night
(can you hear that serious pounding
of the ages? not nocturnal lovemaking of the muses
but the bad persona pounding the good.)

i don't love you for the savage beauty
of your flesh
nor for your sun-spectred countenance
and your stars that paralyze the sky--no,
i yearn for all you do not give me:

wild geese winging over the moon, blindly.

a small dream controls my destiny
veering into vast blue loneliness
calling from the netherside of the universe

lover, i am calling you
from the northeast hinterlands.
i am scrawling this long love plume
mocking my own befuddlement.
believe me, baby, when i tell you that poetry
doesn't matter--only happiness,
an eternal noonscape
more substance than shadow
where your arm drapes over my pillow,
the sun kissing it, just so.
i can see you driving
zenfully, chariot
rattling through the blue void.

and even though i can't admit it to myself

i am missing you.

my ass should be
spooned against you.

how am i doing with this completely new-word poem?

i have loved you
when i have been
long-haired and braided,
silent and over-wordy
but never without mercy

what is the past participle of the heart?
she would have loved not to have loved.
let us make mad love
until birdsong morning

i will take your olive branch deep within me
some night
while the stars
are shimmering.

see? this really is the same old poem

it was midnight when the moon broke the sky
into two pieces. i was dreaming in chinese and
a sampan was vanishing in emptiness.
my father walked along the beach, utterly unconcerned
with the crack across the sky

"no point in telling the dead about dying", he said,
"love is akin to breakers and the sound of the sea",
and hand in hand with my son, he vanished beneath the waves.

that's when under the southern half of the broken sky,
i could feel you comforting me--
your lips on my hair, my head tucked
under your chin, your arms tight around me.
you were clothed in bright light; i was dressed
in shadow.

summer has spent itself like a plague
and i've been brushed by its quick green wings.
i have known no other shape than that which
contained me --i had fallen for your voice

just as a mirror falls in love with the lake
like a folded rorschach.   buoyancy was all
that ever made the water bearable
now my heart sank in the water like a stone.

i sat by the fierce moon and sobbed in the glass box
of my memory.  "i'm sorry but  i can't stand this," i said.
just tell me why you stopped loving me".

in the dream i had a dream
that you would be warm to the touch
and that's where i left it for the time being--
there is nothing else to do but wait
in the swell of your remaining.

your voice fell away from my ear.
even if i had walked out to the edge
of my half of the broken sky,

even if i had begged for help from the moon

you wouldn't have come.

i have to be careful what i say. i might
inadvertently plagiarize autumn
with all its mists and melancholy,
beautiful in its ruin,

unlike our awkward demise--
me, waiting in a blue room forever,
you far away with your life slowly soaking
into time's blotting paper.

even the late butterflies are gone
from massachusetts. leaves have gone
to rust, house lights go on at half past four,
corn fields have become ghosts of husks.

all the things i longed to share with you--
you would have hated anyway.
stacking wood, shoveling snow,
not a soul in sight but you and me

and those nights bathed in the red glow
of the fireplace, music singing in our bodies
as we undressed with the howls of the coyotes
echoing in the hills and the moon
gathering her brood of stars--

all nothing but a dream wreathed in smoke

 

i have stopped using my head,
instead i will think with my soul,
that humble blade of grass in my chest,
that parking lot after all the cars are gone,
that baggy wistfulness like the trousers
on an old man's skinny legs, that dry tranquility
among the broken twigs.

when sorrow pulls at my feet,
i listen to the sounds brought by the wind
from a great distance.
the window makes sounds, not trying
to call anyone,
the sun keeps on setting, not wanting
to abandon anyone.

someone is reading aloud from a book:
The Worried Man Walks the Street of Happiness.
he is hard on himself, and his past
has already left without him.
he can see the bunched branches of the willows
combed neatly by a cool wind
lines of willows waving
one by one

oh so sadly

i can see him with my soul

 

not today.  no maudlin tales of love lost,
no self-pity, no sorrow.  no swallowing clouds
and eyes full of rain.  no horizon broken
in the knees. only sunlight lifting from the shadows,
stones unmasked, bright strands of wind.
later, there will be a lopsided moon-smile
on the darkness, a smudge of evening star.

yes.  there will be memories.  fern seeds in your
pocket, making you invisible. your voice,
river rocks, night distilling moonlight.
dreams furthering into our veins. a  red room
that will never forget you. roots forever woven
into your name. unfinished poems--joy forever
on its way. tree and road bowing to one another.
whirled air on the sun-blessed hills.

above the southern ridge, a hawk has collected
the years, hunted the whereabouts of a name,
found it nowhere.  the river moves the incorruptible
exiled hero a breath nearer to bright water
and the spillway of horizons