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 beating knot at the end of a sentence. Large as that.
Among spiderwebs and moss a life will cry come spring.
The Chinese called their Gobi dead red dust.
What shall I call you?
Tonight I took my shorn hair and laid it on the arms of the pines.
In the morning the hummingbirds will line their nests with me.
COWICHAN VALLEY POEM
The heron has only one leg
and he stands on both of them.
DISPENSATION
I see the dragonfly and the lily through a grey veil.
The clarity is like what I would like to remember
fine wine is and can’t because the distance is too great.
But the accuracy is there in spite of the refusal.
Yesterday I went to the garden as my mother did
in the surety of solitude, my crawling into the dark
in search of skeleton weed and hawkweed,
ragwort, spurge, hound’s tongue, toadflax.
The barren earth is what I want, the coolness there.
I know I almost know.
I am by the yellow lilies at the pond
staring at the water through the fretful wing of a dragonfly.
What is this divinity that I must search for it again?
My mother kneels under the mimosa, demure.
Which she wasn’t. But that I see her so
through the dragonfly’s pellucid wing. Going blind slowly.
The deep beyond the gossamer. The purity of that.
DRINKING STONE
The wooden ladle is thin, worn away by stone.
I cup my hands in the basin, lift water to my mouth.
The high creeks find their way to quiet waters.
I was at home on the gravel bars until poetry drew me away to the city.
I fished the high lakes with my brother, dead now these many years.
An old man found the ladle in the back of his shop in Fan Tan Alley.
A wooden spoon carved in a village northwest of far Xian.
Strange, the sudden memory of a spoon I carved as a boy.
A child of the bush, I wanted to be alive in a simpler time.
It is foolish of me now to look at my hands and remember
how difficult it was to carve the ladle’s bowl with a knife blade.
I think of that spoon now, the wind drying my hands.
How