i started a joke

I should be a little too old for this.
But

in the mornings I still have my tea,
the toast, slices of a piece or two
of fruit

as though nothing has changed.
The weather 
has been kind of late, two days now.

It tells me to come for a run or what
may resemble like it.
I try not to think of a woman 

filling my recent days, with whom
words are exchanged
like gifts.

To each other as though we are young
again, somehow. In a way.
I am a little too old and she is 

a little older than I am; but also, 
married. Isn't it quite an old joke?

I think about meeting you

I think about meeting you 
in spring when the forsythias are in bloom
and on the twigs of trees are flowers
and the days are lovely,
the nights are cool.
It would be like we are young again
believing there may be worries 
but nothing could stop us from loving.
And then we would extend the hours
into a one long inexhaustible conversation
as though a movie.
As though a movie.

A poem for you

Photo by WV Mozer

Time for rowing 
and fishing.
A bear alone
but not quite 
in the distance.
The sense
of quiet.
Though nothing
truly is.

inside the ribcage

Here, at this time of the year, the sky flatten 
the hours. It becomes almost impossible to tell,
sometimes, the time unless you press your pulse

to know you are still among the living. Here,
where every thing has become so efficient and
then not. The selvedges are ripped, if one cares

to notice. Such small things like the seeing
through an opened window the lovers, now kissing,
have forgotten to close. Most of the time

every one has learned to move with flat-line
hearts that have become so civil, so tirelessly
euphemistic that at times I am beginning to feel

this calamity, incredibly scripted, un-human.

be careful of adventures

Be careful of adventures. The point is 
not always the going but the be-coming 
something else, familiar and not. 
The change, something that will happen, 
that has happened, within. We will not

be ever the same again, as the river
is crossed, as the day has ended.
As we have entered the wilderness
of love or of loneliness--the being
that was once our old selves suddenly

turning to be so much younger, so much 
a believer than we have finally become
here on the other side. 

the silk road

Names are always beautiful. As beautiful 
as we can imagine them to be. Framing 
them with the lines of our wants, the unsaid 
and unanswered needs. We tell and we do not
tell; the yearnings are always difficult,

no words come, they balk at the touch.
If I may be direct, how will you respond?
If I tell you I wonder how it will be
to be right across you, the table meant
for two? It is possible.

All these exchanges happening while sharing
a metaphysical table. So it is this, we
have no bodies, no faces, no names; but
how the words flow. Moving and always
in a state of unsettled be-coming.

The silk road can be seen from outside
our window; a candle flickers, you unfold
a table napkin; I search for a word trying
to find an excuse to look at you.
Someone comes close, asks what we'll have
for dinner. 

light

The conversation tonight was about light. How temporal it is. Like body, like breath. Like how two people meet. Living, and then, also, leaving. Both. Always happening at the same time. This mad provision 

we call here, now, what exists, merely passing in time & space, brushing, lingering, lingered, in transit, a longing, through the vastness this presence, phenomenon, is-ness, then gone, to where? from where? extending, to nowhere, elsewhere, liminal, between, nuance, distance, distances, horizon, eternal.
The commonest road has no name. It is a road that is not a road. It is light. That stretches. A beam, a bridge, crossing, reaching us at the selvedges, where we are on the folds of happenstance, wrinkle in space, in time, breathing each other, are you there? am i there? here i am. here you are.

the unsame world

How can we live in a same world?
I made the mistake of looking out 
the clear glass of the front door 

and smiled (did I really?)
           
that the man who saw it took it
as sign he could shovel.
My shovel was leaning on the porch

so there was no need of him.

But it was early in the morning
and I was just coming down to tea
and the man was cold, explaining

his deal for something to eat.

The things we could, need to do.
The real things beyond our real.
I didn't carry

cash, what is also called the thin
line between warmth and cold, 
the places where people stood. 

wsw 18 mph

There are movies about this.
And books, and love affairs
and stories.
How there is a wall, call it
wind, geography, distance

upon which we press our ears
and listen to the other.
Words and breaths.
We place our palms flat
on the wall and listen to

the wind howl, the gusts
shaking the leafless treetops
and making the windows sound

as though knocking, to open.
But we do not. Knowing why
it is better, not.

do you sail?

The past few weeks I have been thinking of rowing.
There are two rivers nearby, large 
at this time of the year. 
There is much need to release and attempt to draw 
out into a clear line what has been repeatedly said.

I have stopped taking walks and will have to resume.
I no longer have my dogs.
I sleep and dream and wake up as though 
I haven't slept at all.

St. Patrick's may be a day with a reason.
Maybe one day we will happen to meet, you whiskey 
on hand, me, on the rocks.
And because I do not believe in therapists, 
I wrestle with own shadows,

Fill up the to-do list and bed with heaviness.
Sometimes the day begins with a clear mind
which means nothing and I come down to make tea,
which means coming through a number of doors 
that entering or exiting becomes uncertain.

sitting on the steps, leaving on a bike, at 10

There is a plausible reason why
women (may) tend to believe it is
they who are rejected.
The apparatuses of ideologies
repeatedly soak them so.
But long ago, before all these

we were ten and I said something
that had hurt you and I was sorry
and you wouldn't accept it,
refusing the popsicle offering
already starting to melt in my hand.
Sitting on the steps that summer

I learned who will always be
fearful; and suddenly fearful 
of my own discovery, I 

threw away the offering in anger.
The popsicle's sweetness 
melting away, its bone to the sun.

Was it my first desperation then?
The first grand show 
to the largest audience of one

whose magnificence I discovered
and feared. And she?
She wouldn't even look at me.

So at ten, I took my bike and
learned to leave in pompous glory.

what a wo/man does

What a woman does, it seems, is keep   But who am I to talk about woman?
all windows and doors, holes, slits,   When there is truly no difference.
fissures and cracks, gaps, spaces,     No lines of be-ing. 

open. That is no sin.                  Isn't everyone not and is     
The sense of whole-ness.               The same?

A continuous flow of wind & water,
fire and memory. There is no sin.      An endless lecture on construction,
Only a means to control people, his-   Suspicion and disbelief...

story, ideology...                     Also, indefatigable hope
I have stopped believing               In all its sarcasm and irony.

six hundred lifetimes ago. Not enough  
knows how we receive distorted forms   I am tempted to ask her
after translations: Freud's            Straightforward.

"die Seele" which meant "the soul"     But here, now, much caution
became "mind" in the pages rendered    Almost not unlike young again.

into what seems an undying treatise.
It is difficult to trust               Is it her rejection?
the nuances after a long time.         There is truly no difference.














                                     
                   

by the river

A mile from where I am, there is a river.
There are ducks, some other birds. The water
fragments and glistens like glass, and runs
with a sound like bodied spirit-wind.

Sometimes the afternoon walks take me there.
Mostly to see the sun 
set behind the mountains. Beautiful sky.
There are men who sport fish, bass usually.

It is tempting to do the same; though, 
why bait and hook a fish merely for pleasure
stops me in much the same way
I stop myself from crossing what separates 

us.

the teddy bear and the doll

Simone de Beauvoir might as well have corrected 
Freud, showing him without raising her voice, 
how the lack is not the girl's, but the boy's.

Freud had glorified the boy's little thing which
Simone describes as wart, in other words,
insignificant. She says

everyone begins protected and pees sitting down, 
until the boy 
is weaned again and is told

"Stand up, you are a man."
"Stand up, be a man."

And so the pain is converted, becomes aversion.
The want, into compensation. 
And then both of them meet, Freud and Simone,

on the same road noting the girl with her doll
and the boy with his penis and his animal toy,
the teddy. Notice

it is Freud, as nearly all men, who is trapped
in his family name; it is Simone who has her own.
As nearly all women, able to move fluidly

one house into another, belonging truly to
no one but herself. Her own name she keeps
no matter the changing family names.

It is all, really, a matter of perspective.

Whenever I see a woman, I know how small I am
against the mystery of worlds, the layers
she knows of life and living and loving, depths

I can never be, trapped on the shallows.
How I compensate, like everyone else.

what the mind says

what the minds says/ is altogether different.

i take walks in the morning, walks

in the late afternoon towards evening, evening late

the lights becoming/ is altogether different.

i have to keep remembering now, nearly

all the time what made the decision to keep on 

this way beyond distances and times of day, past

the roads seen ahead/ what the mind says

is altogether different.

jade

Carve out a hollow into your existence

You will find there is no difference 
between you and the American woman
who touched the Maneki-neko,
unashamed to ask for luck and fortune.

    outside the lonely shell of you car

You will overhear two colored women
tell each other organic food is luxury,
will read an unadorned student's poem
say thirty dollars a month for food.

                         through the steady pace of your feet

You will see the question is never too far, 
it is always here, no matter
the whitewashed porch and the flowers 
blooming quiet as if in peace.

                                       this blooming day of falling leaves

You will touch what is intangible, this
palpable need to fill in the hollowed out.
Not unlike how you felt as a child pouring sea
from cupped hands into the hole in the sand.

The Act of Remembering

A dangerous thing, this act.
Betrayal to one's own mind who
once decided and precariously
ordered the will to 
severe part of itself, 
preserving most 
of what spirit remains.

And then suddenly this-- 
re-collecting, bringing back
to make as part again
what had been 
intentionally let fall away.

When still young, there was 
so much strength to push
ahead, against the gusts.
To keep forward the head
steady from not looking back.

Perhaps because the road
was still long, the young
eyes still unable to sense
what lies by the by, 
by the bend.

Our immortal's time.

Now here we are. Here I am.
The familiar autumn 
on my back. I try, I try
to push against the gusts.
To keep away from the act,
from surrendering to
remembering. I do not want

to say I am afraid that come
this winter, the bones will,
on their own, remember.











  

body of reason

She does not know Hegel. That beautiful woman
at the screen I speak to, the screen a window
if only possible to get through. What else

does she not know. She does not preoccupy
herself with is-ness of things, abstractions
and smiles at me, my follies. Talks instead

of government politics and the series on TV.
Her work on people, the current music,
the produce market that is newly opened,

transplanting the herbs in the garden, the rain
this monsoon, and sending the dogs for groom.
These things now without me.

Where I am now, the leaves turn. Tonight
it rained on the way home. The phrase remains
no matter what it means.

woman with the sun behind her

How could your photos be so
beautiful your life
an entire summer

There must be no worries
they do not exist
they touch you not

There you are at play with
dog at the shore
one sunset

Your laughter and your memory
of it as well as my envy
will last very very long

Love

On better days it is easy to remember
as though never forget
                       love
a clear thing
like the awareness of a lovely day
like this
without that cat across the street
                       black and passing