by Ed Bok Lee
All summer, the city engine's low
roar capsizes our bodies into sleep,
groans,
evacuation—
Lost to a watery
anamnesis so warm it requires a raft
thatched from death's
flotsam to necklace its shore
I swim on, calling your name
In my dreams, something is always deserting
But tonight, no fast shadows of birds
No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies
or bright beach of child's porridge and bones—
Instead, someone weaving
a net from fallen hair in and around our bed
to catch the breath, blood, and ritual
motions that oiled us
as one candle in a cave
In your dreams, someone is always resisting being saved
My teeth are on fire, you say I said
Don't fly for the labyrinth, once
I thought you were admonishing me to go away
I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons
phonographed in through a wounded window
Everyone can't have a cactus
Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs
Once I awoke screaming, paws red-hot embers
You opened my mouth and poured a night-cold river in
Once you died and my heart fished all winter
Once we were eating lunch inside a kiln
Once you thought you smelled death,
but the lavender farm was too large to shave
On the fifth straight morning I'd dreamt of water
I stared at your face, its nacreous lids,
and I swear I could see a Glorious Ghost shifting
over your sun-warm waves
Water my birth sign, and one day my mother's death
that protect-fills my love with sadness
There, in words to my coworkers
it was still dripping, in my nods
over a galapagos of pages and forms
All love is immigrant, that autumn apparently
I mumbled
Your reply, after days: Turn off the steam in the trees
Somewhere right now, two lovers are conversing
without even knowing what their lives mean
One's heart gazelle-quick to survey a mountain his dead
father is always vandalizing
The other frequently misplacing her hair, ears, or self-
sabotaging a crime
One usually struggling to stay alive
The other often untethering something
Or is it my mitochondria that powder-sugars the moon?
And you calcifying a promise inside to inscribe?
There is a dominion where inverses
invert until only terror, love, and imagination cling,
heavy, on human branches—enter your vista, phylum
unsequenced, dimmer deeds
Can you hear it tonight?
Wind in iron jars buried inside the living:
Grandmothers, past spouses, cable men, priests
Now! I finally manage
as our train smokes out all the rats on their bed of leaves
All night, I dive
down to the soft structures of some blue civilization's faith
In this myth of life, I keep forgetting whose ideas and
sensations I'm supposed to be
Come morning: rain, trees, silvery
sleet
and daily, this new fresh bounty
we share, side by side
like angels coming home from work at a pearl factory
Last updated May 31, 2019