Carcanet Poetry

The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring,
anyone can make a fine meal

I was not
permitted to prune it but I held the bowl in my hands,
a pine blowing in high wind
like man in the universe.

But the trees were everything.
And how sad we were when one died,
and they do die, despite having been
removed from nature; all things die eventually.
I minded most with the ones that lost their leaves,
which would pile up on the moss and stones—
The trees were miniature, as I have said,
but there is no such thing as death in miniature.

It was as dark as it would ever be
but then I knew to expect this,
the month being December, the month of darkness.
It was early morning. I was walking
from my room to the arboretum; for obvious reasons,
we were encouraged never to be alone,
but exceptions were made— I could see
the arboretum glowing across the snow;
the trees had been hung with tiny lights,
I remember thinking how they must be
visible from far away, not that we went, mainly,
far away— Everything was still.
In the kitchen, sandwiches were being wrapped for market.
My friend used to do this work.
Huli songli, our instructor called her,
giver of care. I remember
watching her: inside the door,
procedures written on a card in Chinese characters
translated as the same things in the same order,
and underneath: We have deprived them of their origins,
they have come to need us now

Well, it was just as I thought,
the path
all but obliterated—
We had moved then
from the first to the second stage,
from the dream to the proposition.
And look—
here is the line between,
resembling
this line from which our words emerge;
moonlight breaks through.
Shadows on the snow
cast by pine trees.

Long ago I was born.
There is no one alive anymore
who remembers me as a baby.
Was I a good baby? A
bad? Except in my head
that debate is now
silenced forever.
What constitutes
a bad baby, I wondered. Colic,
my mother said, which meant
it cried a lot.
What harm could there be
in that? How hard it was
to be alive, no wonder
they all died. And how small
I must have been, suspended
in my mother, being patted by her
approvingly.
What a shame I became
verbal, with no connection
to that memory. My mother’s love!
All too soon I emerged
my true self,
robust but sour,
like an alarm clock.

Say goodbye to standing up,
my sister said. We were sitting on our favorite bench
outside the common room, having
a glass of gin without ice.
Looked a lot like water, so the nurses
smiled at you as they passed,
pleased with how hydrated you were becoming. 18
Inside the common room, the advanced cases
were watching television under a sign that said
Welcome to Happy Hour.
If you can’t read, my sister said,
can you be happy?
We were having a fine old time getting old,
everything hunky-dory as the nurses said,
though you could tell
snow was beginning to fall,
not fall exactly, more like weave side to side,
sliding around in the sky—

You children, my mother said, must sleep
as much as possible. Lights
were shining in the trees:
those are the stars, my mother said.
Then I was in my bed. How could the stars be there
when there were no trees?
On the ceiling, silly, that’s where they were.

The wind blew. Nights I could see
shadows of the pines, the moon
was that bright.
Every hour or so, my friend turned to wave at me,
or I believed she did, though
the dark obscured her.
Still her presence sustained me:
some of you will know what I mean

Clearly, he said, someone must finish this story
which was, I believe, to have been
a love story such as silly women tell, meaning
very long, filled with tangents and distractions
meant to disguise the fundamental
tedium of its simplicities. But as, he said,
we have changed riders, we may as well change
horses at the same time. Now that the tale is mine,
I prefer that it be a meditation on existence.
The room grew very still.