TO THE TUNE “SHUI DIAO GE TOU: SONG OF WATER”
“I dance / with my shadow and know it is still good / to be in this world.”
TO THE TUNE “MEI HUA YIN: PRELUDE OF PLUM BLOSSOMS”
“If your heart is left behind, / what keeps twisting your eyebrows like a lock? / Wind flaps the boat curtain, bending a wisp of fishing lamp.”
Baroque Silence
“As fog entwines with fog, / so Bach weaves into the rooftops of Paris / on a day of rain”
Dieter with the Tulips, Munich, 1984 (Nan Goldin)
“Of all the portraits, this. Spare / morning, Garden of Eden. Apples, / tulips, butter-knife and the body / terrified of separation, / from God—no, of separation.”
![[I saw how, once connected, we made a shape]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66994f20d5dbef1dcdc9b198/1752068513702-17X0T791666EEMJJS46P/afonso-morais-zV3Amsq1nCw-unsplash.jpg)
[I saw how, once connected, we made a shape]
“and the shape had a name though not / in a language we know, which is different / from a language one speaks. A language one / speaks has form.”
In another life, I’m sure we’re two frogs on a leaf
“一日三秋, three autumns in a sunrise, the first sunrise in three autumns. I miss you. / Yes, let the imagery head home. Yes, the light pins itself to your cheek.”
an attempt to gather rosebuds
“As if one could determine the quality of a place by the type of flowering / tree outside the window where one most writes.”
GHAZAL FOR HELEN
“The metaphor of oil is tiresome unless one has spent a life / Taxed and retaxed in the currency of oceans’ mezzotinted oil”
American Highway
“We’re driving / through a desert that used to be a park, used to be lake, swamp, hiding place. / We’re on the run. It’s a movie.”
Sometimes When I Say Ohio
“I mean this endless field between us / this state where we have not kissed / kissed but only once”
Love, Explained by Flying Foxes
“Or perhaps memory is a poor archivist, / saying what it finds beautiful, / or strange”