Poetry

after Ozu (1936) It’s 1924 in rural Japan.A widow who’s spent her life workingin a silk factory finally decides to sacrifice everythingfor the sake of her only son’sone wish: to study in Tokyo. “Be a great man,” she tells him.He’s all she has. Twelve years later, she travelsto the capital. She hasn’t seen himsince the…

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 nearby, blistering beyond the fence. Of marble     halls on the fifth floor,…

about rugs and the fluid acres weft from silk worms and sea grass, a     deep plushto 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,     sawdusteddrawers and drawer-pulls and knobs like…

I slept under highways. Railroad blankets.Pale blue sections of tarp. Boathouses.Scaffold of downtown apartments. Blackclouds above me, the shadows of mountainslike mountains of darkness themselves.In Paris I slept in the Rodin garden. The fountainturned off. The pigeons disappeared to theirquiet corners in bushes. I stayed up most nights,afraid to sleep, listening closely for sounds.There was…

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 want to tell…

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

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Having someone who knows that you fallasleep 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 to seal?As reticence divides good silence?As time…

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

I’d hear a sound off in the treesand follow it for hours.I touched the bark of an old maple and watchedthe ants take my hand. Still in the front yardmy mamma is cleaning trout,like her life there is the gutting,the clipping of fins. I sliced my leg open on the fence leadingto this wildness, two…