Poetry

after Ozu (1936) It’s 1924 in rural Japan. A widow who’s spent her life working in a silk factory finally decides   to sacrifice everything for the sake of her only son’s one wish: to study in Tokyo.   “Be a great man,” she tells him. He’s all she has.   Twelve years later, she…

unfolds over the piano      played by my son’s teacher   as he watches at her side.      Builds slowly, with stories   of farmland, splintered barns,      pumpkin patches rolling   toward bay, toward ocean.      Of yellow mustard fields,   of fishing nets, of rivers      gone dry. Of cemeteries   where my mother and I      must linger…

about rugs and the fluid acres weft from silk worms and sea grass, a      deep plush to muzzle the floors, the daze of medallions, how stains darken with      time, rugs and how we cross them, leave the slight crushmarks of      our feet talk about closets, doors and how the air stills when you shut them,…

I slept under highways. Railroad blankets. Pale blue sections of tarp. Boathouses. Scaffold of downtown apartments. Black clouds above me, the shadows of mountains like mountains of darkness themselves. In Paris I slept in the Rodin garden. The fountain turned off. The pigeons disappeared to their quiet corners in bushes. I stayed up most nights,…

One friend decided to forego sugar for a month. Another the word wept. A third quit therapy in favor of praising the aubergine tinge in the clouds   that served as backdrop to the tree limbs falling through his mother’s yard. Sometimes I want to give up living by lists and information, yet I still…

When I’m sick, I wish     whatever song is in my head would stop. Tonight, it’s the same     tune my mother sang to tuck me in, its notes      the kind of kindness only distant trains still hit—soft     like a string of Christmas lights sort-of      smiling from a darkened window—the same tune     I took up, humming some, to steel myself against…

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones   Having someone who knows that you fall asleep best on your stomach. And being unable to fall asleep because of him.   Wondering: how much do you share, and how much keeps you apart? And in what way– as a tongue the edges of an envelope   it would like…

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones You wrote to me about a tame pet hedgehog who fell in love with a scrubbing brush.   Shut inside four walls he’d found that special someone like him and not like him, otherness and kinship.   How hard he pattered around it before he understood that otherness has an advantage…

I’d hear a sound off in the trees and follow it for hours. I touched the bark of an old maple and watched the ants take my hand.   Still in the front yard my mamma is cleaning trout, like her life there is the gutting, the clipping of fins.   I sliced my leg…