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