When did I know that I’d have to carry it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket,

the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until

the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?

Where would she go, because I would go there.
In the morning, nothing but a blanket and all her

absence and the feeling in the air of happiness.
And so much loneliness, a kind of purity of being

and emptiness, no one you are or could ever be,
my mother like another me in another life, gone

where I will go, night now likely dark enough
I can be alone as I’ve never been alone before.

A chance so close to zero, zero’s a baby
pool shoved against your screen door

thirty-six thousand feet below this airplane
where a preschooler chokes on a pretzel.

Every passenger stands, clutching
their necks as the mother scrapes her finger

down the girl’s throat. “You’re living in despair,”
the psychiatrist said back home. Long after

she forgets she once stopped breathing,
the girl asks if a plane ever falls from the sky.

“Sometimes it does,” you say. “Sometimes it does.”
One in eleven million. And when she says,

“They’ll catch us, the yellow trees,” you see
the start of a ginkgo tunnel: You haven’t lost

a baby. You go to work, sell tires, rinse
your feet at dusk in your makeshift plastic

pond, where soon all the suns will float:
the bright petals you won’t win, but find.

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
   As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

        By Rihaku

Acid washed

Jeans, bitten down

Fingernails, I’ve been

Uptight all

This week wishing

Invisibility,

Scented tissue

I can tease

Into flowers, same

As ever My heart-

shaped collapsible

Locket is still

Missing & I miss

Wearing it open,

I remember a black

Fog inside so

Combed through, trapped

And willingly

Shining me on