sometimes i believed that love alone
could make it work, like silent, tenacious
spreading of an emerald moss, the greening
of a grey heart.

i'm not sure if what i heard was you
calling my name because
i was so busy calling yours
as if calling is possessing
and each time i breathed your name
i was eager for attachment

as if my mouthing of your name
seemed to say, why is it never clearly mine?
why have we met so late?
why do you appear in my irresolute heart?

in the overlapping of love and departure
in the drowsiness of dream and waking,
a mistake of falling into someone else's heart
also becomes their error.
is it 'forever'?
is it the possessive pronoun 'yours'?

is it existentialism, or lao tzu, or
chang tzu, afternoon tea,
or a couple of borrowed verses?

from the scent of lilac
and the sound of running water
a whole spring is extracted
in the landscape of a poem
the lilac bush is planted right there
in the first line.

a rose bush
is reflected in the window
a bubble is waiting to be scooped up
from the sparkling brook

and from the secret rooms
of a poem,
limbs outstretched on the bed
are mountains and rivers too
with underground rapids
surging toward the middle of the verse
where a peach-flushed ballad
breaks out of the walls of the room

a hand is raised high.
a voice whispers,
i want to be loved
because there is no substitute
for an encounter
of flesh and blood
(he reads the newspapers
eats breakfast
and imagines her brushing her hair)

memories and dreams
are a puddle
that cannot be wiped off
the bed-covers,
the poem is dumbfounded
by the red tongue of desire
that licks the sheets

rivers and streams
burn between thighs
in the seventh verse
and dreams only drift
in your direction
like willow catkins caught by the wind

the name that you whisper
sinks into echoes in the eighth verse.
all night you pace the room
as my fingers nip the candlewick
and you cannot understand why the brook
sobs instead of chuckles
when it flows through the palm of your hand

you are awakened by cold jade
nine thousand candles burn
in nine mirrors in the ninth verse.
a bright moon shines on the sleepless,
a woman walks toward you along the wall
her face an illusion in the mist

she hands you a lock of dark hair
that turns to a wisp of smoke
it is water and will rise
to become a cloud
it is soil and will be trampled
into a path on which you walk
it is a face hiding among the leaves
more despairing than a sunset

her hands
point to the window
where the sun is rising in the fragrant air
a pair of wings fly into the fading moonlight
whispers recede farther and farther away
an echo reverberates in the next to last line--

the window opens and it's dawn

i know it's safe (in this walled city cobbled
out of many a forced metaphor)
to plagiarize my twenty-one-year-old heart
because no one's going to read it
with it's broken promises, vagrant enthusiasms,
befuddling hints, and obliterated faith.
it's an ancient kingdom
whose once-known lines
i'm tracing
in the dark;
mostly history
whose possible future
has not yet been revealed.

in the first fold of morning light
my heart is setting out
like a haggard gypsy caravan, wandering back
to that old copse of trust-filled beginnings,

inching toward an immeasurable darkness,
every year like a door left cracked open,
or a faucet dripping through the night,
or a three-corned tear in silk lingerie. . .

a fully cataloged museum of circumspection
and amputation. (for instance, 'there is always
a moment or two in the course of a theft
when you forget you're stealing something
and on top of that, you can't really stand
all this stealing going on.')

whoever runs off with something ought to
at least take care of it--
(rains, hearts, shameless vows, words
waiting for me to force them
into another bad poem

shaped by a pathetic dream)

perhaps birds
never see the sky
just as schools of fish never see
the water.
earthworms don't see the dirt
that they eat
maggots don't see the waste
that they ingest,

and people don't really see the world
that they have made.
they suffer sad anxiety all the time
and bleed from the sharp points of their dreams

when the night sighs
in the melancholy rain.
damp and mist pass through the door lock
until every inch of longing is an inch of mold.

for a while when we die, mail piles up
outside our door and we are fed on the bones
of dead language.  even if we really believe
that our lives will conclude in a glorious reunion,

the odds are probably against it.
the wind will provide
shadows, mirrors, and abandoned cars,
all dripping through the fog of memory

like rain in the noon of night
on a gray sign over a gate:

The Cafe of the Lost in Time

i  lean my head on dawn's wind
and my hair spreads out along my arm
in my frail, worn sleeves
that are raveled at the cuff
i lay my head on my imagination

and i can see you there
in front of your window
i know you are thinking of
some other history before your life
the wandering and slaughters in founding an empire
or a nation or freedom

the wind comes from a golden sky
but here a cold forest in black ink
regulates my hermit's heart...
you lay your head on my arm

and i can hear the burning and downfall
of cities, centuries, hearts..
weapons abandoned on plains of morning smoke
and a boat quietly waiting

to bear us to an island
beyond time and bloody history

i've been footloose in a world that can break
a person's heart. you could say i have had my head
in the clouds, but sometimes i've
had sand in my craw. i spurned all advice
that cautioned against the time
love would swallow me,
then forget me.
(they had never known
what it was like to love someone
as if nothing would ever again
be worthy.)
nine years ago,
i found my fortune teller
in chinatown.
he said, "speak to the gods
in metaphorical language--an autumn sky
going down in flames, a face
eclipsed by time and distance,
shadows in the dusk,
eyes filled with lost years.
he never said a word about
work or money, death , life, or love.
he never mentioned the windmill
turning in my heart.
before i could even blink, he ushered me
down the steps to a street awash
in red firecracker paper.
and ever since that day
i haven't been able to speak.

my heart is in my mouth.

spring is slow in coming
but the jacob's ladder
is blooming.   i see it as if
from a sedan chair, my heart
forever longing for a better past...

a sudden shower and the rain
comes down like a plague
of locusts, the clouds over my head
are amassed like wild beasts

and you are somewhere afar,
casting shadows, doing whatever you do
until we meet again in this heaven
of our own making, scarred

and moon-shod.  we won't retreat
into a poemless night. we'll come down
from the clouds to hear the ghosts
in the wind, the geese in the grass...

they say the roots of poetry
grow stronger in the soil of sorrow;
then dwindle in the chapped power of time.
but we are not yet ready to fade away
from these echoing rooms, these closets
of hidden cries...

i watch a figure and his shadow
mowing the grass
around gravestones, tending, tending,
always tending the silent trembling inside--

tuning the stars, jarring the dark alive