LITMIR.BIZ

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a Japanese

      calligrapher who draws a dot beginning on the floor

      off the page. He looks at the page, shrugs,

      there is nothing there, and pictures budding chamisa

      in a courtyard, yellow yarrow hanging over a bed.

      In Waimea Canyon, ‘apapane, ‘i‘iwi. X: it’s

      the shapes of ice in an ice floe, a light-green

      glazed lotus-shaped hot-water bowl. He opens his eyes

      and recalls staring into her eyes as she comes.

      2

      A visual anthropologist dies in a head-on collision

      and leaves behind an Okinawan bow, arrows, whisk,

      Bizen bowl, hammock, New Guinea coffee beans,

      calligraphic scroll, “In motion there is stillness.”

      Walking along the shifting course of the Pojoaque River,

      I ponder the formation of sunspots, how they appear

      to be floating islands, gigantic magnetic storms

      on the surface of the sun, and, forming cooler regions,

      become darker to the human eye. I ponder how

      he slowed the very sharpening of a pencil

      but sped up La Bajada behind a semi in the dark,

      and, when the semi shifted into the right lane,

      was sandwiched and smashed into an out-of-state

      pickup driving down the wrong side of the highway.

      I hold the blued seconds when—Einstein Cross—

      he cursed, slammed on the brakes—the car crunched

      and flew apart in a noise he could not hear into

      a pungent white saguaro blossom opening for a single night.

      3

      Green dragonflies hover over water. In the mind,

      the axis of absence and presence resembles

      a lunar eclipse. Hiking a ridge trail in the Barrancas,

      we notice the translucent wing feathers of

      a red-tailed hawk circling overhead. Once,

      inadvertently, I glanced out the bathroom window

      and noticed yellow yarrow blooming in sunshine.

      A man does not have to gamble his car away

      and hitchhike out of Las Vegas for the mind to ripen.

      Bill Isaacs slices an agaricus lengthwise, points

      to the yellow base of stipe, says, “Xanthodermus.”

      Although he has walked up a trail into spruce

      and fir, mycelium in his hands has spread out.

      Although asthma may be passed from one to another,

      one mind may be a sieve, while the other may be

      crystals growing up a string. Is sun to earth to moon

      as mind to shiitake to knife? When one mind

      passes to another, green dragonflies hover over water.

      4

      Is the recollecting mind an aviary? Once he pushed

      through hermetically sealed revolving doors

      into a humid forest where he sighted a toucan,

      but where is the o‘o a‘a? A pin fits in a pocket,

      but how do you put a world inside a world?

      Two twins, ex-marines, stretch Okinawan bows

      and aim their hips and eyes at the target;

      the arrows are not yet not yet released.

      As death burns a hole into a piece of paper,

      a fern frond in the Alaka‘i Swamp uncoils in mist.

      He glows when she puts her hand on his chest;

      the sun spins faster at the equator than at the poles.

      He lays six blossoming orchid branches on the floor,

      stares at the shapes of flower vases on shelves

      in the storeroom. It is as if all the possible shapes

      of the world were waiting to come into being,

      as if a new shape was about to come into being,

      when, x, a calico cat scratches at the door.

      5

      When you stoop to examine a lichen but find

      alongside, barely exposed, several gold chanterelles,

      I bend to earth in my mind: observe striations

      along a white cap, absence of annulus, dig,

      unearth a volva. We go on in the woods

      and stumble into a cluster of teeth fungi

      with dark upturned scales on their caps.

      Who notices in the early morning Saturn slip

      behind a waning gibbous moon? This year,

      a creation spiral slowly incandesces in my hand.

      I slip a white elastic band off and loosen

      your hair, rub my thumb in your palm. I love

      when wet sunlight splashes your face, recall

      grilling shrimp near a corner of the screened porch

      while rain slants across the field. In the few

      weeks of a year when bloodred amanitas push

      out of the earth, we push into a splendor of

      yellow plumeria, orange hibiscus, bird-of-paradise.

      6

      Pears ripen in a lacquer bowl on the butcher-

      block table. A red shimmer arcs across

      the northwest sky as a galaxy bends the light

      of a quasar. Yellow ranunculus unfold in a glass vase

      while fireflies blink in a corner of the yard.

      A physicist employs lasers and slows atoms

      down to approach absolute zero; a calligrapher

      draws the silk radical twice, then mountain,

      to form “the most shady recesses in the hills.”

      As the ink dries, she lights two red candles

      in the bedroom, notices near the curtains

      taro in the huge tin tub, and spots a curling leaf.

      He hears the gasp when he first unzipped

      her jeans, knows the small o is a lotus seed

      slowly germinating in his mind, but the

      brevity of equation makes him quiver and ache.

      When they turn to each other in a wet kiss,

      their

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