LITMIR.BIZ

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the violet haze when a teen drinks

      a pint of paint thinner, the incarnadined

      when, by accident, you draw a piece of

      Xerox paper across your palm and slit

      open your skin, the yellow when you hear

      they have dug up a four-thousand-year-old

      corpse in the Taklamakan Desert,

      the scarlet when you struggle to decipher

      a series of glyphs which appear to

      represent sunlight dropping to earth

      at equinoctial noon, there’s the azure

      when the acupuncturist son of a rabbi

      extols the virtues of lentils, the brown

      when you hear a man iced in the Alps

      for four thousand years carried dried

      polypores on a string, the green when

      ravens cry from the tops of swaying spruces.

      5

      The first leaves on an apricot, a new moon,

      a woman in a wheelchair smoking in a patio,

      a CAT scan of a brain: these are the beginnings

      of strings. The pattern of black and white

      stones never repeats. Each loss is particular:

      a gold ginkgo leaf lying on the sidewalk,

      the room where a girl sobs. A man returns

      to China, invites an old friend to dinner,

      and later hears his friend felt he missed

      the moment he was asked a favor and was

      humiliated; he tells others never to see

      this person from America, “He’s cunning, ruthless.”

      The struggle to sense a nuance of emotion

      resembles a chrysalis hanging from a twig.

      The upstairs bedroom filling with the aroma

      of lilies becomes a breathing diamond.

      Can a chrysalis pump milkweed toxins into wings?

      In the mind, what never repeats? Or repeats endlessly?

      6

      Dropping circles of gold paper,

      before he dies,

      onto Piazza San Marco;

      pulling a U-turn

      and throwing the finger;

      a giant puffball

      filling the car

      with the smell of almonds;

      a daykeeper pronounces the day,

      “Net”;

      slits a wrist,

      writes the characters revolt

      in blood on a white T-shirt;

      a dead bumblebee

      in the greenhouse;

      the flaring tail of a comet,

      desiccated vineyard,

      tsunami;

      a ten-dimensional

      form of go;

      slicing abalone on the counter—

      sea urchins

      piled in a Styrofoam box;

      honeydew seeds

      germinating in darkness.

      7

      A hummingbird alights on a lilac branch

      and stills the mind. A million monarchs

      may die in a frost? I follow the wave

      of blooming in the yard: from iris to

      wild rose to dianthus to poppy to lobelia

      to hollyhock. You may find a wave in

      a black-headed grosbeak singing from a cottonwood

      or in listening to a cricket at dusk.

      I inhale the smell of your hair and see

      the cloud of ink a cuttlefish releases in water.

      You may find a wave in a smoked and

      flattened pig’s head at a Chengdu market,

      or in the diamond pulse of a butterfly.

      I may find it pulling yarn out of an indigo vat

      for the twentieth time, watching the yarn

      turn dark, darker in air. I find it

      with my hand along the curve of your waist,

      sensing in slow seconds the tilt of the Milky Way.

       Kaiseki

      1

      An aunt has developed carpal tunnel syndrome

      from using a pipette. During the Cultural Revolution,

      she was tortured with sleep deprivation. Some

      of the connections in her memory dissolved

      into gaps. “My mind has leaps now,” she says,

      as she reaches for bean threads in a boiling pot.

      Her son recollects people lined up to buy

      slices of cancerous tripe. “If you boil it,

      it’s edible,” he says. And a couple who ate

      a destroying angel testified it was delicious—

      they had not intended to become love suicides.

      What are the points of transformation in a life?

      You choose three green Qianlong coins and throw

      Corners of the Mouth, with no changing lines.

      You see red and green seaweed washing onto

      smooth black stones along a rocky shoreline,

      sense the moment when gravity overtakes light

      and the cosmos stops expanding and begins to contract.

      2

      In the Brazos, he has never found a matsutake

      under ponderosa pine, but in the dark

      he whiffs it pungent white. Five votive candles

      are lined along the fireplace; she has lit

      a new candle even though the one burning

      holds days of light. The night-blooming cereus

      by the studio window is budding from rain.

      In his mind, he sees the flyswatter

      hanging from a nail on the lintel, a two-eyed

      Daruma hanging from the rearview mirror of the car.

      He hears the dipping-and-rising pitch of

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