Vete a la mierda, hijo de puta!
Hate is beautiful in Spanish.
Contempt too, the woman at the table counting the money.
Even now he is unsure if any of it is true.
But there was the outline of a snake carved into that pine headboard:
Hermoso, sí.
Shadows mostly, chimera, ghosts.
BOKUSEKI
Iris blades cut through the last ice on the pond.
Emblems of endurance, they are what a man knows
who asks of the grey clouds they witness his passing.
I don’t know where the water goes, remember the thin creek
I drank from when I lived in that cabin by the sea.
The doe grazed among fallen apples in my yard.
When I shot her she hung for a moment in the sky.
There were days back then I lived without regard for life.
Forgiveness comes hard.
Each year I rake the leaves and burn
the winged seeds of maples in the flames.
I kneel by the pond and ask where I am going,
what it is I must do. Bokuseki, these iris blades in ice.
When the rain dries on my palms it leaves the trace of Gobi dust.
Each night I breathe a far desert, vestiges of the fall.
BONSAI
Ts’ze, you love the sheep. I love the ceremony.
—The Analects of Confucius, Book III, Chapter XVII
The jay screams his morning song in the derelict pine
as I trim the stump of the old cherry tree.
Even with gloves my hands remember the cold,
remember breaking these wrists when I was a boy.
My arms mended wrong.
On the weathered board by the pond, five bonsai,
their leaves red as spilled blood.
Autumn maples grown from feathered seeds.
Bonsai.
How carefully I torment them every fall, cutting back their limbs and roots.
My chainsaw lies among the scattered rounds of the cherry tree.
Among my fingers, torn ribbons of wind.
In the pond the winter fish consume themselves slowly. Waiting.
So too the night.
Water has its way under the ice.
The jay laughs as he torments the day. And I say, Never mind.
BOXWOOD
The child splitting kindling in the cold shed at dawn
is learning how to trust the eye, not the hand,
and not the hatchet, for these last go where the eye wills.
Still, the child will cut himself more than once
until he learns to go past the eye, the kindling falling
like music, sprung notes clear in the morning.
BYA JHATOR
“I want to believe in one place,” he said. “I want it in my blood.”
—Olen Steinhauer, The Bridge of Sighs
Three vultures in the ditch below Hartland dump.
A doe lifts her head from the gravel.
Bright dawn and images, this false world.
A vulture takes a hop, a loop of gut in its beak.
Why now, this song of tired messengers?
The doe’s eyes, curious, ask nothing of me.
Hers is a modesty I can’t touch.
The earth is everywhere and scant.
Infinitesimal creatures rise up to prey on us from the offal we wade in.
As the vulture, we piss on our naked legs and hiss.
I give, as always, alms to the birds, a sky burial, a breath in flight.
The volt hulks on the bare branches of the dead fir.
It is one place, rock, not stone.
CALLIGRAPHY
It was before the plum blossoms. Before that.
Before the mist and the wind rising from the sea.
And the little brown bats in the false dawn gorging on fragrant moths.
The feast that is the promise of light.
The raccoon was only a tail, a slip in the failing shadow.
And Basho coming home, his ear torn, happy with the night.
And, please, before I forget.
Write this.
Write this down:
the old rat turns and turns in his paws a delicate seed.
And the Horned owl meditates upon death on the yard pole.
O, and yes, before the pilgrim sea lion’s moon song
was your hand in my hand in the dark.
CLOSE
Snow dust in the pines and the shadows of swans on skim ice.
The surface breaks and sweet water swims in their feathers.
What joy to sing a last song to the moon.
Twilight is upon me. My poor eyes gather in the dusk.
Surely the earth trembles at the hummingbird’s heart in the egg.
The
