Xuanhu

In my cellar of black wings,
All the little birds who died

In my awareness, in ways
That came to my attention,

Scruffy-headed, beady-eyed,
Lend their feathers to the ghosts

Who grow giant remiges
And rustle, shadow angels,

Overcrowded in the foxed
And mildewed books of the mind.

It’s not the end of a life,
Large or small, that matters most,

It’s that lives end, end at all,
The ending of all living

That keeps life going, that sings
Sweetly in the morning light,

Flying toward a clear sky,
Shining and airless by night.

What Is Jade?

Question: when were these words said?
“My dream is to buy a house
In my hometown and marry

A beautiful girl.” China,
In the nineteenth century?
America, yesterday?

Ancient Rome? Ancient Egypt?
In the trenches of a war?
As it happened, yesterday

Beside a collapsed jade mine
Where hundreds of miners died
The day before in a slide

Is the right answer, this time.
It could have been any time,
Or almost. The young man’s dream—

Success, windfall, resources,
High status where he grew up,
And an enviable spouse.

He’ll be back, digging for jade
In the mud in a few days,
Along with more survivors.

The odds are long against him,
Long and cruel for all of them,
All the young inheritors

Of ancestors’ strategies
That worked somehow to create
Them, their fantasies, their lives.

What We’re For

Today could be the day the world ends.
Today could be the next day of your life.

Probably not but probably. Trust the world
To get on with itself, with or without life.

Imagine the latter. Imagination is all you
Can get for death, for a world without life.

Tricky, eh? All you can rummage around
In imagination’s trunk and find is living.

But let’s try. No one will have anything
To say to us, won’t read us, won’t exist

To judge. Also, the planet, or the constant
Maintenance of life on it, then ruins, quiet.

It quit. Maybe humans destroyed it.
Imagination would like that—potent

Humans, favorite topic of imagination,
After all. But gone, with all of it, after all

That. Just a nice blob of iron core spun
Into a bead, a dot, whizzing round its sun,

Like the other inner, rocky planets. Done.
Imagine that. We lie in the dust, perhaps,

But not all of us even stopped at that.
Most patterns wholly burned, evaporated.

Not one of these lines has been left intact,
Not a word. Nothing ever to breathe them

If any had remained. There. That’s gone
For you. What can’t be reconstructed,

Not even for a few fragments, and no one
To reconstruct things. We’re all for that.

Until Then, Don’t Forget

Of course, there’s no need

For the world to end,

No need to pretend

A poem won’t be read.

The dragon of days

Might uncoil quickly

Or slowly, smoothly,

So that life goes on

In its bright green scales,

And even humans

Flourish in the nest

Without soiling it

Overmuch. The woods,

The oceans, the plains

Of farms and grasses

Carry on growing.

No one has to read

These or any lines

To know that life grows

As lives go. No one

Has to be possessed

By another set

Of phrases to guess

Sun rises. Sun sets.

Who do we address

Other than readers,

Other than ourselves?

For now, then, nothing.

Shadow Star

I would like to close my gate,
Bimen, live in seclusion,
And look away from the clouds

That are always lit like flames,
That are always inflamed. Dark
Desert or woods would soothe me.

I’ve had enough of faces
Glowing in every window.
A sky is enough for me.

The brightest moon won’t wake me.
I sleep best when I’m alone.
If I get up, I won’t dress.

If I watch for the shadows
Of night-flying birds, I’ll cry
Out in delight at a glimpse

Of something that could be one.
Leave the road unpaved and rough.
Leave me a world dark enough.

No Exceptions

Covert authorial intentions
Tiptoe through the shadows like shadows

Themselves. Don’t count on noticing them
Or exposing them. You need a grip

On chronology, especially
Clocks and calendars, lunar cycles,

The vocabulary to describe
Time as supernatural event

Greatly elaborating changes
In your experienced sense of self.

What I remember now is silence,
But I’m sure I heard a growing life

Pushing up from the dirt, shredding dust,
Uncoiling in a long narrative

Of many non-narrative segments,
Adding phrases like bits of armor

Or camouflage. Frail as each segment
Was, it was wonderful to witness

The tiny pieces working through them,
Their gears digesting meanings like meals

You could see through the translucent skin
Of their larval-stage leviathan,

Deflections of conversation, birds
Overnight in the tree by the creek,

The coming of spring, the subtle blues
And roses, the pinks, the gold-green dawns

Of a plague season in the desert,
The morning shoving the moonlit gate

To the grassy pasture in the oaks,
Trying to get the night to open.

And there’s your book then, phenomenon
Of insight and nonsense in ruins,

Garbled, gabbling conglomeration
Of wet leaves, thoughts, light bones, and refuse.

Onward

We might want to remember
Who we’re writing for—no one.
We should write like we know that,

Should speak to our audience,
Stop drifting off to wonder
What someone reading might think.