Beihai Park at Sunrise

At dawn, face lines gild the living. Can you say
what shaped them, rice wine imbibed over
tiger slaughter, the east sun, palanquin shade
for Beijing rain, or slow-moving despair?

Blinking in the mist of morning they slide
against the soundtrack of history, friction
and fog lifting like heat off kang or last rites
for ancestors who outlived revolution.

Frame with your iPhone, but you’ll never know
what moves them, what death carts for the starved, sins
stained in red armbands, auguries foretold
of regret or gods, so forget asking.

Here in this park they dance to synchronize
frantic and fragile heartbeats, even yours,
if you dare take their ribbon and swing it
to unfurl mountains in this prosperous air.

~

Ancient Park in Southwest China

Among the bronze cauldrons
under the jade marquee

in front of the Dragon Pond
prostrating to Lady Pagoda,

if a pickpocket
replaced my wallet

with a woodblock
scripted with an apology

I would cherish it
when I reached to pay

with the money of another time
and currency of a remembered place.

~

A Cat Looks Up From His Slumber

Awakening to the world,
an Aegean blue, a sphinxlike yellow
tawny and sulfurous
in the hot cinder of light
and paling cool of shadow.
He is of multitude of names, therefore nameless.
He knows of existence, the place of things, through kindness,
fixed by scraps of mercy and bones,
the dust alone deaf to his importuning.
What do we see, looking at it?
What predilection for life, what predilection for grief?
What infirmities waiting to beset us,
what futures sullying the fur of the planet’s back,
nation-states, tender hearts, what wars
between supercharged dreamers reaching for the high of fantasy
will fight?
                        Or do we see
a blurred beauty of our own reckoning
subsistent on the earth and dust of our creation,
our wounds, our scars, our overbite,
the soft purrings of our petty desires and gracious pleasures,
our two fierce eyes blue and yellow which could see through sins
to a substance of things
nameless and awake,
always?

~

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First published in Saginaw, 2024