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 Cisticola

What is the negative space

that elides all thinking, all reclaiming

its hidden gardens, floating leaves, pale fronds

arcing out and beyond themselves and further into you.

There is no answer to this— only shade, and more shade.

Like the brownish-grey cisticola,

unpicking the slim blue rudiments

of chance, that transient thing that takes you,

as if by the hand, into its far-gone regions.

Is it the pain that pulls you onward, not hope, not will—

is it the possibility of the past emptying

its fine spokes onto the dry grass, unmeshed,

and without the clear lines that felt so unassailable,

now softening, like the Aegean blue that,

once fastened to its mirror, seems to adjust

not only the limits of sky but the limits of seeing itself,

as if seeing is only a matter, too, of inwardness opening

outward, pulling instead towards the light that warms you

like the sun-crest of another island where the dusk-light,

indigo-red, is pooling into yet more of own passing.

Goshuin

I suppose I will catch you at another time,

another place where memory,

like a light manoeuvring itself inside

a shrinking space, preserves only what it needs to

to preserve itself at the small.

What remains here but the last

of the thread-bare, wishing and unwishing itself

into a golden weave—

what isn’t coated in gold is coated in silver

and shadows still search for timeliness among

the sun’s swift passage, unbreaking

the laceleaf and replacing it with

star-glow: in another life I was made of this,

and you were made of mine,

and inside of it I knew you entire

by the sun-swelt beading your forearms

and the days we honed into budding flowers,

the lacquered brocade of the ordinary

sealing us into singularity. We become the

wing that bears the undreamed of

life, which, knowing no alternative,

becomes inevitable. Our ordinary glimmers

with that which cannot be remade from

the detritus of the storm that, in this life,

took us out so carelessly. What is it that you lost

when you lost yourself inside of you?

In this life don’t know you at all

but in another one I know you at the bone:

I hold your pain inside the small of myself,

I know you from the shade the ordinary makes

across the lines of our fragile bodies.

In this life I become the pilgrim,

fluent now, in the murmurs a storm makes

before it rises structures I once imagined

moored to the unalterable.

Did you mistake our gold

for what which is merely ornament?

Were we, perhaps, like the final pages

of the Shuinchõ, supposed to remained un-filled in?

Are these absences, by design, what is meant to fill them?

Were we, perhaps, like the final pages

of the Shuinchō, supposed to remain unclaimed?

Is this, by design, what they are claimed for?