the cloud of ink a cuttlefish releases in water.
You may find a wave in a smoked and
flattened pig’s head at a Chengdu market,
or in the diamond pulse of a butterfly.
I may find it pulling yarn out of an indigo vat
for the twentieth time, watching the yarn
turn dark, darker in air. I find it
with my hand along the curve of your waist,
sensing in slow seconds the tilt of the Milky Way.
Kaiseki
1
An aunt has developed carpal tunnel syndrome
from using a pipette. During the Cultural Revolution,
she was tortured with sleep deprivation. Some
of the connections in her memory dissolved
into gaps. “My mind has leaps now,” she says,
as she reaches for bean threads in a boiling pot.
Her son recollects people lined up to buy
slices of cancerous tripe. “If you boil it,
it’s edible,” he says. And a couple who ate
a destroying angel testified it was delicious—
they had not intended to become love suicides.
What are the points of transformation in a life?
You choose three green Qianlong coins and throw
Corners of the Mouth, with no changing lines.
You see red and green seaweed washing onto
smooth black stones along a rocky shoreline,
sense the moment when gravity overtakes light
and the cosmos stops expanding and begins to contract.
2
In the Brazos, he has never found a matsutake
under ponderosa pine, but in the dark
he whiffs it pungent white. Five votive candles
are lined along the fireplace; she has lit
a new candle even though the one burning
holds days of light. The night-blooming cereus
by the studio window is budding from rain.
In his mind, he sees the flyswatter
hanging from a nail on the lintel, a two-eyed
Daruma hanging from the rearview mirror of the car.
He hears the dipping-and-rising pitch of a siren
glide up the street and senses a shift
in starlight, the Horsehead Nebula, and, in the dark,
her eyelashes closing and opening on his skin.
3
He knew by the sound that the arrow was going to miss the target;
pins floating on water;
I saw the collapsing rafters in flames;
the dark side of the moon;
if p then q;
simplicity is to complexity
as a photon is to a hummingbird?
fire turns to what is dry;
when the Chinese woman wore a blond wig,
people grew uneasy;
an egg exploding in a microwave;
morels pushing up through burned ground;
at the cash register,
Siamese fighting fish were stacked in small glass bowls;
she lost all her hair;
digging up truffles;
what is “a quantum unit of light”?
4
Tokpela: sky: the first world; in her mind,
she has designed an exhibit exemplifying
Hopi time and space. He sees the white sash
with knots and strands hanging from the trastero.
He sees the wild rose by the gate,
red nasturtiums blooming by the kitchen door.
She is pressing the blender button and grinding
cochineal bugs into bits; she is sorting
slides of Anasazi textile fragments on a light board.
He recalls when they let loose a swarm
of ladybugs in the yard. It is light-years
since she wove a white manta on the vertical loom,
light-years since they walked out together
to the tip of Walpi and saw the San Francisco Peaks.
Goldfish swim in the pond in the back garden.
The night-blooming cereus opens five white blossoms
in a single night. He remembers looking
through a telescope at craters, and craters
inside craters on the moon. He recalls
being startled at the thought, gravity precedes light.
5
They searched and searched for a loggerhead shrike;
