Come, Thief Page 3

The left-behind branches

  winch themselves silently upward,

  as if released from long thought.

  SHEEP

  It is the work of feeling

  to undo expectation.

  A black-faced sheep

  looks back at you as you pass

  and your heart is startled

  as if by the shadow

  of someone once loved.

  Neither comforted by this

  nor made lonely.

  Only remembering

  that a self in exile is still a self,

  as a bell unstruck for years

  is still a bell.

  THE DARK HOUR

  The dark hour came

  in the night and purred by my ear.

  Outside, in rain,

  the plush of the mosses stood higher.

  Hour without end, without measure.

  It opens the window and calls its own name in.

  EVERYTHING HAS TWO ENDINGS

  Everything has two endings—

  a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.

  Before a life, air.

  And after.

  As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

  PROTRACTOR

  A window is only a window when stepped away from.

  To swim in deep water should feel no different from shallow,

  and yet it does.

  Losses are so. Split into yellows and blues.

  A child’s protractor proves it:

  what begins near quickly grows far, once the lines are allowed to.

  As two are in a room, then only one.

  Death on one side of the clear glass,

  not-death on the other.

  Neither saying a word from inside the enlarging.

  THE PRESENT

  I wanted to give you something—

  no stone, clay, bracelet,

  no edible leaf could pass through.

  Even a molecule’s fragrance by then too large.

  Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.

  Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.

  They remained air.

  I offered memory on memory,

  but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?

  I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.

  How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

  I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.

  IT MUST BE LEAVES

  Too slow for rain,

  too large for tears,

  and grief

  cannot be seen.

  It must be leaves.

  But broken

  ones, and brown,

  not green.

  HAIBUN: A MOUNTAIN ROWBOAT

  Go for a walk on the mountain. The trail, up many wooden stairs, passes some houses. In front of one, an old man is building a boat. All summer I have watched this mountain rowboat. Like a horse in its stall, patiently waiting for evening hay, it rests on its wooden cradle. Finally, today, it is being painted: a clear Baltic blue. Horses dream. You can see this move through their ears. But the hopes of an old man spill, as waking life does, through the hands.

                 amid summer trees

                 blue boat high on a mountain

                 its paint scent drying

  GREEN-STRIPED MELONS

  They lie

  under stars in a field.

  They lie under rain in a field.

  Under sun.

  Some people

  are like this as well—

  like a painting

  hidden beneath another painting.

  An unexpected weight

  the sign of their ripeness.

  CHINA

  Whales follow

  the whale-roads.

  Geese,

  roads of magnetized air.

  To go great distance,

  exactitudes matter.

  Yet how often

  the heart

  that set out for Peru

  arrives in China.

  Steering hard.

  Consulting the charts

  the whole journey.

  COME, THIEF

  The mandarin silence of windows before their view,

  like guards who nod to every visitor,

  “Pass.”

  “Come, thief,”

  the path to the doorway agrees.

  A fire requires its own conflagration.

  As birth does. As love does.

  Saying to time to the end, “Dear one, enter.”

  SENTENCINGS

  A thing too perfect to be remembered:

  stone beautiful only when wet.

  §

  Blinded by light or black cloth—

  so many ways

  not to see others suffer.

  §

  Too much longing:

  it separates us

  like scent from bread,

  rust from iron.

  §

  From very far or very close—

  the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.

  §

  As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,

  we listen to the murmuring dead.

  §

  Any point of a circle is its start:

  desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring.

  §

  In a room in which nothing

  has happened,

  sweet-scented tobacco.

  §

  The very old, hands curling into themselves, remember their parents.

  §

  Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

  IF TRUTH IS THE LURE, HUMANS ARE FISHES

  Under each station of the real,

  another glimmers.

  And so the love of false-bottomed drawers

  and the salt mines outside Kraków,

  going down and down without drowning.

  A man harms his wife, his child.

  He says, “Here is the reason.”

  She says, “Here is the reason.”

  The child says nothing,

  watching him led away.

  If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

  All the fine bones of that eaten-up story,

  think about them.

  Their salt-cod whiteness on whiteness.

  IZMIR

  Waking

  after long travels

  not recognizing the light

  the windows

  the calls of the birds of this place

  not even your own planted roses

  not knowing if this

  is exhaustion

  or failure

  or transformation into

  some changed existence

  as yet

  unacknowledged

  like the fields

  of red

  and blue tulips

  of stylized Izmir

  painted now onto a bowl

  now onto a vase

  A BLESSING FOR WEDDING

  Today when persimmons ripen

  Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow

  Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song

  Today when the maple sets down its red leaves

  Today when windows keep their promise to open

  Today when fire keeps its promise to warm

  Today when someone you love has died

      or someone you never met has died

  Today when someone you love has been born

      or someone you will not meet has been born

  Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness

  Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired

  Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow

  Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace

&nb
sp; Today, let day and dark bless you

  With binding of seed and rind bless you

  With snow-chill and lavender bless you

  Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly

  Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears

  Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes

  Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you

  Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days

  FIFTEEN PEBBLES

      Like Moonlight Seen in a Well

                 Like moonlight seen in a well.

                 The one who sees it

                 blocks it.

      Hunger

                 A red horse crops grass.

                 A black crow

                 delves bugs from a dirt pile.

                 A woman watches in envy what is so simple.

      Mountain and Mouse

                 Both move.

                 One only more slowly.

      The Same Words

                 Come from each mouth

                 differently.

      The Familiar Stairs

                 How confidently

                 the blind

                 descend familiar stairs.

                 Only those

                 with something

                 to lose

                 grow timid at darkfall.

      Rainstorm Visibly Shining in the Left-Out Spoon of a Leaf

                 Like grief

                 in certain people’s lives:

                 as if something

                 still depended on the straightness of the spine.

      Glass

                 Transparent as glass,

                 the face of the child telling her story.

                 But how else learn the real,

                 if not by inventing what might lie outside it?

      Paint

                 What we see is the paint.

                 Yet somehow the mind

                 knows the wall,

                 as the living know death.

      A History

                 Someone first thought it:

                 an ox gelded, tamed, harnessed to plow.

                 Then someone realized the wooden yoke could hold two.

                 After that, mere power of multiplication.

                 Railroads, airplanes, factory ships canning salmon.

      Memorial

                 When hearing went, you spoke more.

                 A kindness.

                 Now I must.

      The Cloudy Vase

                 Past time,

                 I threw the flowers out,

                 washed out

                 the cloudy vase.

                 How easily

                 the old clearness

                 leapt,

                 like a practiced tiger,

                 back inside it.

      The Perfection of Loss

                 Like a native speaker

                 returned

                 after long exile,

                 quiet now in two tongues.

      Night and Day

                 Who am I is the question of owls.

                 Crow says, Get up.

      Sonoma Fire

                 Large moon the deep orange of embers.

                 Also the scent.

                 The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance.

      Opening the Hands between Here and Here

                 On the dark road, only the weight of the rope.

                 Yet the horse is there.

  THE KIND MAN

  I sold my grandfather’s watch,

  its rosy gold and stippled pattern

  to be melted.

  Movement unreparable.

  Lid missing.

  Chain—there must have been one–

  missing.

  Its numbers painted

  with a single, expert bristle.

  I touched the winding stem,

  before I passed it over the counter.

  The kind man took it,

  what I’d brought him as if to the Stasi.

  He weighed the honey of time.

  ALL THE DIFFICULT HOURS AND MINUTES

  All the difficult hours and minutes

  are like salted plums in a jar.

  Wrinkled, turned steeply into themselves,

  they mutter something the color of shark fins to the glass.

  Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.

  First a jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.

  RAIN THINKING

  When it is finally quiet—

  the loud refrigerator

  still at the same time the heat is—

  I hear the sound

  and awaken.

  Like a cat cleaning herself in the night,

  or a dog opening

  and closing his mouth

  the way they do at times

  when thinking,

  as if tasting something new.

  INVITATION

  An invitation arrives

  in the morning mail.

  Before you have said yes or no,

  your arms

  slip into its coat sleeves,

  and on your feet,

  the only shoes bearable

  for many days’ travel.

  Unseen, the two small fawns

  grazing in sun outside the window,

  their freckled haunches

  and hooves’ black teaspoons.

  Abandoned, the ripening zucchini inside the fence.

  Kraków, Galway, Beijing—

  how is a city folded so lightly

  inside a half-ounce envelope and some ink?

  That small museum outside Philadephia,

  is it still open,

  and if so, is there a later train?

  The moment averts its eyes from this impoli
teness.

  It waits for its guest

  to return to her bathrobe and slippers,

  her cup of good coffee, her manners.

  The morning paper,

  rustling in hand,

  gives off a present fragrance, however slight.

  But invitation’s perfume?—

  Quick as a kidnap,

  faithless as adultery,

  fatal as hope.

  CONTENTMENT

  I had lived on this earth

  more than fifty years