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Three nights ago, exactly, I dreamed 
the woman from five years ago 
whom I've lost to Germany, married 

to a man my jealousy--
    how it shames me to myself 
    that one word over which anger 
    appears more dignified or honorable--

could easily stain undesirable,
something I nonetheless do not do.
Knowing it is my own ego

at fault and not the man himself 
who, on an even keel, I hope would
love her more than she does herself,

which is really another way of saying
more than I had, could.
Three nights ago, exactly, I dreamed

her, with a face I have never ever seen
before but still easily recognized
in the way of those eyes, those cheekbones,

those lips, and arms, and the very is-ness
of her. In the dream, she has grown
more toned, stronger in the way I have

no knowing whether it is out of brokenness
or something finally better. Knowing only
how it was so long ago since 

her dancing was a way to
punish her own body, wring out and into it 
the pain of her psyche:

The weight of words, she called it.
One day, she said, you'll never 
see me again... Three nights ago, exactly,

I saw her again in the dream:
the toned muscles, the scent of her,
"air ballet" I thought,

all that cloth, and all that wringing,
lifting as though made light
the weight of being.

Was she happy? I could not ask
in the dream, our faces were so close.
We could kiss, were about to, would

kiss I do not remember upon waking.
Only the recurring sense, as always,
that I had a chance and I chose

to lose it.

The snowflakes that wait by the road

Dear Friend,

Are the leaves falling where you are? The view of the mountains where I am are beautiful in a quiet and almost sad way whenever it is autumn. Mountains in autumn remind me of both hope and bruise, and that space in between them without a name. Also of Native Americans and the colored people, black, brown, yellow. The weight of history is heavy and long, and though we may want to refuse it, the times remember for us. The length of its memory, the memory of an elephant. Have you ever placed your open palm on a grown elephant? Gentler than the dog's, the dog who loves you and sleeps by your side as though there is nothing else in the world to ask for.

The tree right across my window is black and bare. It is sleeping now that winter has begun. Since my arrival, I have noticed two stray cats called by their names at night by a woman's voice. The cats are not hers. I have seen her on an occasion feeding them in a corner. Sometimes the cats are by porch steps when I arrive; they look at me and I try to put a name to what I feel. I am wary. Though I can count by years the length of stay, moving is always inevitable and necessary. Someone, many years ago, engaged against it: she said there are things that cannot be changed. I let her have her way, though I did not agree and still don't; although admitting, I must say a part of me wants to believe it.

I think about the birds, and the squirrels, and the stray animals at times these days, their lives no more lesser or greater than the lives of those in the Third and war-torn worlds, in conditions where gentleness remains to exist.

On the last days of this semester, students tell of long and heavy histories of themselves; art, again, as always, a catharsis, although...you must have sensed by now I remain grappling: to old to believe and un-believe. Hope. Is Always An Expensive Thing. We buy in exchange of spirit.

There is plenty of sadness and pessimism to share. And yet there remains joy in things so little, like the snowflakes who lives ever so momentarily only to fall and wait by the wayside, to lose itself and rise again.


Signed, P

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.

More nights ahead

We can put together a hundred or more possibilities,
letting two characters meet, in spite the number
of ways, streets, corners, bars, restaurants, cities.
Did you not once say you will have a hard drink
at the bar at the edge of your sleep? Even though cold,
I have returned to the uncertainty of outdoors now, 
stopping at diners where tired men and tired waitresses
call each other by name. The home fries both nostalgic
and sorry. Something always pulls me back. 

Sometimes I look up and watch flocks of birds, mostly
when flocks of young people pass by. Do they
know how we can devote our entire lives
to a cause truly lost?
How the foolish idealism of our once immortal
sense drove us to where we are now. Here...

And is it wrong to think women like you will always be
less lonely? I have come to deny myself. But 
how it bangs its fists on my door wanting
to be let out, telling me 
I am human, human, human. 
So I try to keep away from the door,
away from the bar at the edge of your sleep.

After, Then

There will be no return, woman. 
No knock on your door, my once beloved.
We both are too weary to attempt 
Any more old familiar dance.
Any better man knows, there really is
No more having back what was lost.
What was lost impossibly scattered now.
Irretrievable. Irredeemable.
All that we have left, you and I
Are the remains. Only another form
Of ashes. Arms wrapped around yourself
Standing by the closed front door. 
I, looking back at you, at the porch, 
The yard, the house, the neighborhood, 
The curb, the life,
From the rearview mirror.