There was no will. Only footwork. In sunless hospital roomsI played card games with men twice my age. Say it wasn’tabout falling but the gated terrain’s arrival after the jump,then I landed not in heaven but in Redding where I tradedmy blue jeans & black boots for a dotted white gown. Here,the men & I…
Maybe it means somethingwhen Jeremiah of the Shopping Cartrolls his chariot across this monster parking lotto ask about my soul again. Maybe I should climb aboard this time—we’ll break Wonder Bread,sip Mountain Dew,toss twelve-packs to the children. Maybe I’ll be a part of some miracle—feel for once,memory resisting her adjectives.Hear dreams changing their minds.Every wheel…
While you get high with your therapist, I’m smoking a spliff in a cemetery, readingabout the Birds of Tennessee, wishing we were playing house in New York.The art is beautifuleverywhere, but all descriptions of art are the same.Theory elides the gap between aesthetics and ethics.The greathorned owl lives in the suburbs. I’m dismayedto learn the barred…
Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing “Happy Spring Festival …” I say to the sky.It looks clear and bright. I salute the world.It keeps silent. I greet humankind.The large crowd, once there, are all gone today. Seen through the glass, the world is empty.Where are the people? They seem to be wrapped tight…
I must have been sitting at the wrong table—the conversation was about chilblains,someone insisted only the British knowwhat they are—who among us had hadthem, those red eruptions of welts onhands and feet shivering in the damp cold?No one.(I wanted to change the subject so I didn’t saymy father had chilblains when he swamin our icy…
people like to say, though younever liked when I said itabout this painting, your portraitof a sad clown—your favorite kind.Hair mussed, her greasepaintfaint but still there, she stares outinto an empty place beyondthe unframed canvas. What can I sayto make her stir? Even as a kid,I knew immediately—it was you, Mom.“Not a self-portrait,” you insisted,though…
Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing When I pass through the years, my younger selfno longer awaits me. He has ridden away on a horse,farther and farther, raising a cloud of dust, and finally gone.I have to look for him in a mirror, and see thisslowly aging face that has gradually become strange….
Then, I will be a person who knows ferns—who has tramped the woods for miles to tell youabout glacial egg-shaped boulders mattedwith which kind of fern, and then, forty miles south,that the same kind of fern, the Walking Fern,is still vibrant (though less bosky) on northernslopes, in lime sand, and I will be a hat-wearing,walking-stick-carrying…
I’ve stood in the shape of myself, became well-meaning, started letters with dear. I taught paper to fly, heard animals hide themselves in me, like sex inside houses, like centuries inside histories. A bearded man, who pretended to be a philosopher, a fatalist even, came to me, set a circle before me and said nothing that…
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