Mother Tree
I am free
cut loose from
the branches of the Mother Tree,
surrendered
to the fostered fingers of a silver bird.
I was nine
when I found you, planted,
arms part of an unreachable sky.
Running alone at dusk,
I cried for your attention
the single time in my life
pointing at a bloody shin.
I wanted you to see
what a snapped-back branch had done to me.
On a hill in the woods, I wiped blood away
until all the leaves were red, then
stood up, your roots quivering
as I kissed the bark, gripped an ax.
Pushing Chi
If these hands cannot conceive
what I see,
cannot understand his left
from mine, then
I exist in compromise
alone.
I have not come this far
in self-definition
to risk it all on one move,
but my spirit
knows why I must try.
Here I am, directing
two forces in opposition:
push and pull.
I know this. I am this
and yet,
I struggle to keep pace,
a move behind
the man on a video,
a master
whose breath is invisible,
if taken at all.
Aureole
This same poem, unsaid,
in a thousand lonely mouths,
each holding a pencil
torching lead love letters
in long, arching graphite rainbows.
Jasmine leaves shade the light
but when the sun sets,
when everything is dark,
when my eyes are worthless,
my heaven is always only
an inch away from the world.
It is the distance my fingers travel
when I touch your spine,
the center of the universe,
reciting those archaic words, I love you.
Adrenal ash spread over the lip
of a blue flame; love; water
on the orchid of wanting
to be found and clipped by you.
This vase, Pyrex, is a bed, of course,
as my hand, lost in the tectonics of your back,
removes the cosmos with my daily trespass,
as fingers climb that little mountain
where enlightenment is held in an open box
by Aurora, who greets me coldly,
in white gloves. Even a goddess knows
that her hands are not fit to hold my love of you,
the words of a love child
closing the distance of a god
down to the length of a ring finger.
Postage
Leafing through pages
of a phone book in dream,
I cut my tongue on a Korean War stamp
before noticing
a million of them,
spilling from the blackness of a woman’s purse.
Collage of Seoul
Taped over the headboard, eleven photos
of her neckline
a river splashing through
the wound.
Framed in a golden tomb, the cries of my mother
freeze most specks of traffic.
Tiny cars
pass over bridges, some
never return.
Adrift
Cottonwood in static suspension—
it covers the neighbor’s lawn.
Mid-May, we talk of moving
again. She says we should stay
and I always want to go
somewhere new
and redefine ourselves perpetually
as newlyweds, as
the couple who can not
see
