Work Text:
Poem of Sheltered Resentment
Birds must travel even on days that aren’t sunny—
What do I know of sky or river
Or how black feathers might shine at night?
Heart in my throat, I choke on crumbs of a song.
The River Swallows Anything Thrown
Too cowed to do more than whine when whipped
We let you herd us into the mists,
Squeeze us through chutes more narrow than the bridge
From which battalions of boars had plunged, cloud-touching
Water hard as clay. No stratagem
Could have saved us with your grasp of the worthy—
Nothing could have loosened your grip on the lines—
But now we shall haunt every cup you raise as you boast.
Throwing from the Bridge Three Peach-Stones
I.
With juice on your chin, how can you be so sad?
Yet anyone seeing your face can hear the soughing
Of forlorn and forsaken lovers combing a mountain
Whose mane of snow hides bodies. To not yet dig a grave
With prayers it won’t be needed, in vain,
Like scattering seeds where the sun does not shine—
The flowers and fruit I brought to make you happy
Ripen into rotting scraps, meeting your spirit
As it sinks beyond the reach of friends and family.
Peach pits bobbing on the water like tears
Soon blend into the flow, like grief
Fading to gray beneath everyday woe.
II.
One no longer wishes to be immortal
After watching the failing of bodies
And keeping vigils that neither end at dawn
Nor when clumps of clay cascade onto pine
Already rotting. Nothing can stay,
We learn, even as children:
A pet flower becomes a sad
Shadow of its glory before its roots
Reclaim it and it dissolves into the earth.
Yet blossoms picked from graveyards are fragrant
As any likewise fed with crumbs from a skeleton
And fortunes from the petals just as false.
III (Poem after an imperfect ceremony).
Blatant mistakes blur into litter on roads
The future will not travel over. The past
Clings to the present like dust to a house,
The present to the future like dust on a mountain.