Five Chinese Verses
Music, wind, someone’s car horn
Imagining to return
Buddha’s big toe on the lake
Your intricate gaze of form

Eating the lake like a word
Unzipped carefully by day
You walked it hesitantly
You taste something step by step

                        •

Losing my way, wildly blue
Perhaps annotated past
The return gaze, my snowfall
My city gate firmly shut

Even to wonder how you’ve been
Isn’t what you want, therefore
Lightly enclosing my text
Cast down toward what I’ve not seen
                        •

Happily a ceiling fan
You grasp the word sweltering
Days are tectonic, the sound
Of one memory spoken

Who waits for you at the lake’s
Wild edge? Bright glint of the noun
You knew dissatisfaction
Speaking even against time

                        •

Recorded a length of time
I held memory tightly
Unoriginal dimming
Of  the light there, a found scene

Number three on the dirt path
Father carries his school bag
Without use for meter, yet
Both skies open to thunder

                        •
Don’t speak to me of sorghum
Red fields, pressed up toward a sky
Whatever called to me there
Too wild, attempting a face

Old verses for my father
Dignify the cooling page
Black earth is the word it makes
Tilts forward, consequential