36. Lightning over Changsha

The light is full tonight
the sky mumbling to itself
but occasionally sparking to anger,
like the schizophrenic
screaming “shut up!”
at the two Cantonese ladies
beside him in front of the store’s plate glass.
the light is arrhythmic and inchoate
but the frustration is genuine
and makes me sympathetic
to its righteousness.

Times like this
when the world begins to look poetic,
visceral and brimming,
I don’t wait for moments
to unfold like a map of the present.
I write them down immediately
premature pieces of present-tense that they are.
I am not the good witness.
I am a jealous hoarder of occasions and lines,
but still the sky comes thunderhead
and the line of taillights on the
street below doesn’t stop
for even an upward glance.
Earlier on the same road
under a different-tempered sky
I watched two motor scooters
collide on the sidewalk,
two men get up
and walk away.

35. Chung King Mansion Elevator

“It’s a bit multicultural for my tastes,”
says the man in the black t-shirt and cammo shorts
thick with lower-class English slurred vowels.
He repeats himself a minute later when
a man in a turban gets onto the elevator,
“Yeah like I said a bit multicultural.”
He makes his fingers into a two-barreled gun,
one on barrel on top of the other
pointer and middle finger both
and takes aim.
“Hey take it easy,”
his big, barrel-chested American friend says.
“You think they fucking know?
I don’t know what you can get away with here…”
“…come on, take it easy…”
“I don’t know what you can get away with here,
but in Shanghai you can spit on those fuckers.
They fucking started it.
I hate those motherfuckers”

34. Days and Days

To wake and be utterly alone
there is an odd joy.
Alone in a foreign city on a foreign shore
one’s material life in a bag beside the bed
it stirs the jealousies of possibility
whole empty days as bright as the
lit stone towers beyond the window
to fill with selfish, boyish alley-hikes
and ferry rides, sweated through alone
and tempered by afternoon coffee and beer
to put bored nights to sleep.
A way of life, spacious and quiet.
To always be first to round the corner
and last to gasp at its contents,
to be an expedition unto oneself.
To count the hours with light only,
no sundial or abacus to call ruler
and crutch.

33. the zoetrope

the size of my arm across
slitted and always-turning
in its glass case it swings
wildly, but with purpose
like a many-parted machine
gathering itself into motion
cams and levers pushing in
every meaningless direction
but the whole achieves movement:
here, a flight of birds
spinning slowly from the arms
of a wing-hearted robot
whose image is dazed over and over
round and round the birds
go twisting up but his feet
stay on the ground

32. Clouds

I got drunk on a train to Tokyo
Suntory Highball in a can
and the rain-steamed-rice paddies passing
a good canvas for idiocy.
I tried to count buildings but ran
out of numbers,
I tried counting rainclouds but only
saw one, one long sound making
water and fog
and whisky.

31. Hiroshima (2)

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” — Annie Dillard

It’s raining in a city of bells.
The A-bomb dome is a skeleton chime,
a hollow bell in a hesitant field.
The instrument below the children’s peace monument
has its clapper gagged in plastic
but the burial mound beyond it
strikes a hollow note in the steam
with its grass-covered curves.
I think about the “we” that filled
the ground with ashes.
My grandfather was a radio engineer in the war,
equipment made by Bell,
what notes do I inherit?
It’s raining today in Hiroshima
and I don’t know what to do with all the water.
In the museum the hibakusha simply say
“I met with the A-bomb.”
A hundred thousand souls and every one a bell.

remix Friday #4

30. The City and the Ghibli Museum

I lost my shoes in Tokyo
not to thieves or flood but accident,
a row of shoes by the door and someone took mine.
He left the same pair in their place
but newer
I walked around that mechanized city all day
on heels so white they fluoresced,
Shinjuku to Ginsa glowing like the neon
and diodes on buildingsides
Kuramae to Adhihabara for curry and lhassi
in subway and out
wondering where the crowds are,
no white-gloved men pushing bodies
into trains, just a few faces as blank
as the faces on any subway anywhere.
But everywhere the promise of
a good pair of shoes (go as far as you can)
and god-like machines (go further),
all the way out to Mitaka to find
the promise kept in reels of film
and strobelit zoetropes,
an enlightened robot raising his hands
to reach impulsively
at a spinning exultation of bluebirds.

29. Things Our Host in Japan Found Amazing about America

1. The enormity and variety of wares at K-mart
2. The Walmart provides everything K-mart does and more
3. Free Refills
4. How easy it is to get a driver’s license in Japan
5. How strictly we take the drinking age, despite having “so many freedoms”
6. Ditto for cigarettes
7. The scale of the whole country: big
8. The endless, unchanging American landscape
9. Walking 30 minutes on the road and nothing changing but that your legs grow tired, everything else around you just stays the same.

28. A Thousand Thousand

Four Haikus

I.

twenty-one sets of
arms to save a thousand worlds
is this one of them?

II.

a thousand statues
of the bodhisatva, a
thousand golden hopes

III.

disintegrate, boil
and rot, but the guardian’s
crystal eyes still know

IV.

write your wishes for
the buddha on paper, some
yen, candles, freedom

27. Hiroshima (1)

It’s raining in a city of bells.
The dome of the building beneath the bomb
rings like a steel skeleton,
the memorial mound steams
like a grass-covered bell
muted by ashes.
Who is the “we” that rang the fugue note?
My grandfather was a radio engineer
during the war,
what do I inherit?
A thousand cranes in the shape of a bell.
The children’s peace monument covers
a bell set high overhead; poor shelter.
It’s raining today in Hiroshima
and I don’t know what to do
with all the water.
In the museum the hibakusha
say “I met with the A-bomb”
and their bell-curved helmets
outlive them.
“All my life I was a bell,
and did not know it until I was
lifted and struck.”
The phoenix trees grow greener in
the music of rain
and a thousand paper cranes alight,
every one a bell.