HER GARDEN
 

The mountains crackle
they are full of flint,
the cicada bristles
it does not sing
in grandmother's garden
as mulberry trees
gnarled like her hands
start their long slide
seawards.

I imagine her sitting
under the mulberry leaves,
hot fruit splashed
to her eyes,
a blindness cleaned

in that solitary hour
when trees clamber
out of bark
and swim
to a rock that is black
and bare
and like nothing
else in this homeland.

I like to think
she died in the day
her face set heavenward
exacting little attention
from the sun:
once risen it sets
in finicky chaos
in a sky so flat and blue
that light mirrors itself
as if on water, soundlessly:
so losing body
she crept into her own soul
and she slept.

As young goats leap over cracks
in the garden wall,
as the cicada shunts sparks
from its wings,
I remember her.
She died so long
before my birth
that we are one, entirely
as a sky
disowned by sun and star:
a bleakness beneath my dreams
a rare fragrance
as of dry mulberry
pierced by this monsoon wind.
 

LOOKING THROUGH WELL WATER
 

I hear grandmother singing,
she is singing in well water
I see her face as the waves stir
over cloudy white pebbles.

At the well's mouth
fern fronds dark as hair
on an infant skull
nibble into stone.

She didn't give birth to me
but when I look into the well
it's her face I see, slight
freckled bones bent into water.

I'll tell you what divides us:
a ridge of cloud, two oceans,
a winter in my fireless room
high above Van Cortlandt Park
also death, the darkest water
crashing through pebbles, fern
fronds, bits of speckled shell.

I hear the koil crying in well water
its beak is glazed with blood
it's tilted on a nest of clouds
afloat and burning.