White Space

Write Someone trips on a stone, 

before your eyes, he’ll brush the dirt off his pants, get up 

You watch 

him standing for ages till he vanishes, 

and you learn half-drawn faces have even more expressions 

He bursts straight into your room, 

says the blizzard was fierce, 

huddles on your floor, asks it for heat, 

comes back covered in mud, 

breaks the window, screaming, 

“Why don’t you know how to think anything happy?” 

I want to hear news beyond my power to see: 

how many fingernail scratches the word cliff contains, 

how much more that means these submerged stairs must darken 

He departs for the poles in my stead, 

then I imagine the next scene for the people around the table 

I want just one book, 

nothing written inside, 

night, 

open my eyes, ride a swing about to snap, 

and every single second 

make new sides

So Whose Bite Mark Is This?

On a clattering train, no memory of boarding, 

we trusted we were headed somewhere Each envisioned in our hearts that shooting star 

Where the flame began 

When we buried a white dog in white snow, knell tolling low 

Days of nothing but white past the windows dragged on, suspecting what’s real can’t be seen 

Someone voiced concerns   Have we jumped the rails?    Was there ever really a meteor?   People demanded proof   Started doubting that whiteness 

Their faith 

ground the train from dash to halt Doors opened, people poured out Hundreds of huge boulders lay strewn helter-skelter 

Plenty of these in our own backyard!   Coming from afar, we thought the winds would shift; the boulders slowly lost the light   The train’s disappearing! someone shouted, alarmed, 

and we watched it wide-eyed 

Feet firmly grounded   To return, now one had to believe in those black boulders’ beauty

Enormous Life

Though I dashed down the stairs 

I didn’t sprain my ankle 

Today such things amaze 

Do you think unhappiness is easy? 

The bus came on time 

but I arrived late, 

looking up how crackers differ from biscuits 

I let two summers stream by 

Or actually, set just their rainy days adrift 

It’ll all get caught, 

so why wonder about the bus stop’s feelings, 

whether spaces and traces each know the other exists? 

When you burn a log, its catching amazes, 

so I spend a whole evening staring at the fire 

It would have been nice had the flame burned only the log, 

would have been nice had the wind not helped, 

pot boiling 

and boiling 

Faced with this world’s roiling cadence, 

I keep missing buses 

Mysterious, the woodpecker’s bill, 

why we count rice in grains, 

the word ripple 

I don’t know what’s in the pot 

But I rehearse switching amazing’s to mysterious’s as I tend it 

Not being a quitter 

matters so much to me

Listening Room

We were discussing an island. They say there’s a museum that holds eighty thousand heartbeats. And a forest with little bells dangling from every branch. Imagine standing there some dark windy day. If it were you, where would you want to go first? Want to hear your own heartbeat recorded? Feel a thousand bells shaking at once over your head? You, downcast: Either’s fine for now, but after you die, it’ll all change. I scoop you from the current of thought and seat you on a chair. You know we’re alive right now? Let’s focus on reading the emotion in the sound. We talk again about every kind of sound in the world. Stare at black-and-white photos of a choir. Wish we could hear what they’re singing. Probably not a single one still alive. Taken in the early 1900s. They say sand shifting in the desert sounds like it’s weeping. Know what they use to make it sound like rain when they redub dialogue? You tell me not to answer, cover my mouth. Is it still the sound of rain if you know it’s fake? Don’t you think the sand was crying all the same? Am I broken now? Is this my body? I can’t believe it . . . If you go down that road, there’s no sound in the world that isn’t weeping. Drilling into the earth, chopping fish, trees falling in hurricanes . . . A fire helicopter passes overhead. This room for relistening to every sound in existence. I think there’s a big fire. You take my left arm and feel my pulse, like some quack. Still, I think this sound’s the world’s saddest. Because you can’t overdub this. The sound of blood swirling. Tempo of blood. Where’s the maestro? Overhead once more the chopper flies.

In-Ear

The current quickens · I’m heading toward Saneum · Ringed by five mountains, with a name meaning rich in shadow, whenever I say Saneum, Saneum aloud, I end up guessing the height I can scale when I go looking for that um tone · Even wondering, Does a height like that really exist, because San is San, -eum is -eum, with the current, with the current, I wanted to unfurl the road from San to -eum · I imagine a fire unquenched even underwater, believe in my buoyancy, comprehend derivation, and soon after, the current picks up · The mountains birth shade, shade births chill, and every gap in the night I clung to a boulder slightly smaller than me, waited for permission to just plop down, that it’s fine to love · Saneum, Saneum, imagined planting a tangerine tree there, sketching a railroad · Won’t something run down those rails? · Won’t a world be made? · Days dreaming of landing, straightaway a light gleams, warning not to deviate from the route · The current quickens · A locomotive called Morning’s spurred ceaselessly on · I lean on a boulder smaller than me, watching Saneum receding · The wind’s mouth blowing out every lit candle, torrential downpour, raking both cheeks, landscape of five mountains sinking into the sea · I don’t know how to slow this current, and Saneum fades to a sound that can never return, and as I clasp this boulder smaller than me, it and I, I and it, I wonder who’s really the smaller · Only paper, knowing the press of my pen, remembers I’m here · Sheet music notates each day that floats off on the current, but only the sound of treading the floor and returning becomes a glance piercing paper · But I am headed for Saneum · I’ll convince you why a tangerine tree shakes in my navel every time Saneum comes to mind · To shake your own tangerine with the sound only my ear hears, and by shaking, show you your Saneum ·

Gooseberry, Gooseberry

I imagine wearing white sneakers, 

running full speed ahead 

To deliver them to you 

on your gooseberry farm 

Today, too, you 

receive a cold glare 

and bored, slice gooseberries in half 

Too sour 

to eat raw, 

hand-stinging 

From here to there 

heaped mountain-high, 

freighting carts, 

starting all over again 

You mutter, 

No one’s rescuing me 

I hope the world ends 

and you dream if you close your eyes 

opening them will bring you an ungooseberried world

I kick off my shoes, lace them on you 

When I tell you to get them filthy as you want, 

you crush with the toe box one beadlike berry that fell to the floor 

You loathe how they squelch when you squish them 

This world barely cares when someone goes missing, 

and I mimic you, halving a berry, 

and then you advance like a bloodhound 

Those were great shoes 

You came back You did 

And as your back walks toward the orchard 

the seabed’s story makes you quake 

Gooseberry, gooseberry, growing in ripe 

Though beg you not ripen we may 

Gooseberries grow only on gooseberry trees 

And dreaming of others is vain 

To those who ask why on earth you’re humming, 

you answer, I’m back from world’s end 

The deep-sea fish swimming in your pocket, 

no one would believe

Tonguing *

Because I can’t believe I exist, I walk 

And walking 

I discover a deep black part, 

so truly black The moment I peer at it 

I feel like my body has caught on fire 

The zebra’s stripes, 

the pony’s smallness— 

are they cold? Are they hot? 

I too have spots only I can see 

Small specks caging the elephant of sadness 

I’m practicing my fingering 

Tonguing, tonguing 

When I lift my hand the sound of the beast weeping seeps out 

I might close, might open, 

might dam up, might flow, 

through force of will, 

my will 

What kind of performer will you be? 

To answer the world’s question 

I go on from fire to embers, 

embers to ash

I exist, and 

therefore, noise 

I exist, and 

therefore, sheet music 

When I pull myself out from within me 

the birds perched on the wire fly off 

My instrument’s stored in its case 

Ready to take out at any time 

but not to resound any louder 

Its sound when shut alone in its box 

Torn summer wings secretly mended 

A road toward that sound with neither ash 

nor trace remaining The further it goes, the lusher the recording

* Use of the tongue to control the flow of air when playing a wind instrument

Dimensions Variable

I’m contacted for evidence I have a soul 

and stand up 

Today I shall cook bell pepper 

Left alone, it’d go ghastlily rotten, 

yet plated 

it’s something to stare at, 

so I prep the equipment 

Just a plastic bread knife 

Fine if there’s no other options! 

Even if the knife cuts with bumps 

The key’s not misreading boll for bell 

And trusting when you slice there’ll be a time when it slices 

Like a caramel tree quakes in the wind 

What does a pepper become when sliced? 

Sliced pepper 

And what becomes of sliced pepper? 

A pepper you were going to do something with 

And what of that something you were going to do?

A pointless pepper 

And what awaits a pointless pepper? 

What is not bell pepper becomes non-bell pepper 

And then? 

And then? 

Sings, like a caramel tree quakes in the wind 

I love peppers’ vegetal scent, 

their lack of heat for a capsicum 

Do you know the plant bears blossoms? 

They symbolize waste-of-breath 

Every time I get a dunning call to prove I have a soul 

I love my pepper blinking its big eyes, rolling to hide in corners 

What did you make? 

What is its genre? 

Well, this, this is my soul . . . 

Before I even start explaining, 

the door bangs shut, the ringing won’t quit 

Despair builds no stairs when it comes

Toward Saneum

1. 

Terrified each night 

by buglers popping up, 

outpacing me, the rising intervals’ 

blaring shriek at my back, 

the trumpets’ cry, their cry, 

I plugged my ears, 

wanted to go back to being unborn 

Toward Saneum *

where I first started, 

um, um, 

searching for a story not yet spun into words, 

I plunged into the water 

2. 

It took time to get used to the watery dark, 

passing the vaguening gaps from yesterday to today to tomorrow 

Did I know what I was looking for? 

I harbored doubts, 

but as a coral reef neared 

I finally realized 

what I’d been looking for, wanted to find 

I shot out questions, 

How much can you hide me? 

Can you blot out my stripes, my colors? 

The colorful corals told me 

I was large, 

so large 

they couldn’t conceal me

3. 

I needed to find a bigger reef 

I want to hide That’s how I’ll 

come to understand myself, 

light passing through my hair 

Here, each time their too-many names 

touch my fingertips, they tickle awake 

I stand once more before the corals 

Are you the reef that can put up with me? 

—this time unspooling 

when all color’s leached 

from these bone-bundlelike 

bright white corals 

. . . um, a note, a tone, 

tale of how I waited for 

those corals I faced to be rediscovered 

and got this deep eye-gleam 

One tone, spark hanging from its tail, 

circles beneath the surface and disappears 

4. 

White vase, white paper, white chalk, 

I think of clean white things 

Close my eyes, hold my breath, 

feeling nothing but ocean and me existing, 

submerged with neither an end 

nor even a drop of water 

All this 

happened though I merely jotted Saneum on a blank sheet of paper 

That moment, blank paper adrift on the sea 

became a white bird and flew off

* Name of the place where my parents first met. It no longer exists.

Walking the Carrot Field

Here to there’s all your land, he said. I’ve never had so much. I close, then open my eyes. There it is. 

What’ll I plant? Hope whatever I do’s harmless. I blink, and something starts growing. I’m a grower. 

A warm color, orange. Gives vim, vigor. He said it won’t be long before I harvest the carrots. I was mulling whether I even want carrots and stumbled a second but 

trusted the spillage so small no one would notice. 

But the carrots were watching. The gleam in my eyes. Shining, cutting through me. 

My carrots dug into the soil, took in a mole. It had eyes. 

I’ll give you a bag. Take as many as you like. Too good to eat alone. I relished the crop, then gave up the land, on which 

Now I face 

the mole’s eyes 

Here I am 

Carrot patch unfurling 

under moonlight 

A long story only beginning 

as a short one draws to an end