Mostly in the Afternoon

I’ve been trying to write a blog entry for a couple of weeks, but it can only be about pain and danger, which I was trying to avoid for the sensitive among you. Can’t I write about something else? I have the whole city at my feet. But you must understand, there is nothing else. Not now. This is the summer of lead, of life-in-death, of agony by the window and fervent pill-counting; this is my father rising.

What else is there? The government is insane. The climate war is over, and we lost. Millions will suffer and die, in storms, floods, drought, thirst, hunger, and despair, yet I cling to my love poems (I’ve written 12), the only good to come out of my farcical & endless story. Love poems can survive a thousand years and nobody remembers how the world then was being driven to ruin—or cares who the man or woman was; he/she is just any old beloved.

My goal is to become the sort of woman who doesn’t fall in love. Who loves largely and thinly; who writes. Who has done something alchemical with her heart, or simply forked the devil in the belly so the black blood curdles on the floor; and then is sweet as a meadow of star-white flowers, a meadow with no beginning, no end, no center.

UNTITLED POEM (iii)

Bite back passion. Spring now sets.

Watch little by little the night turn around.

Echoes in the house; want to go up, dare not.

A glow behind the screen; wish to go through, cannot.

It would hurt too much, the swallow on a hairpin;

Truly shame me, the phoenix on a mirror.

On the road back, sunrise over Heng-t’ang.

The blossoming of the morning-star shines farewell on the jewelled saddle.

Lǐ Shāngyǐn (812-858)