has nowhere to go: a focused holding
over last year’s losses, not to laugh at, a pattern
clearing the Sea of Taiwan, heading ashore
as a cold front at Okinawa condenses
the turbulence: more rain off the Pacific in a day
than in Carson City in a decade,
and you say the door has closed
too hard, answers too slow to come.
When the train stopped for the flooding you were right
not to take roads leading home, now covered in boulders and mud,
buses trapped or fallen off the coastal highway caved away…
Angry tourists from abroad complain in standard dialects clear and harsh.
The hot spring hotel has no hot water and you call to recall my faults,
my unbearable neglect. I want to go to bed early
before the day’s fatigue takes us down.
My cell phone is down to the last red line
after 2 a.m. I am difficult to get to know, granted –
forsaken by givens like the gods,
overwhelming happiness leftovers from old battles and empires
still divvying their grids of species in the present
folding the world away for a rainy day, living for a rainy day.
It is a pleasure to be stuck in the rain,
but please – spare me, clouds of mercy, storms I can’t see.
My friend says there’s a hot spring around the corner.
We soak, talk about how it’s not working.
He shrugs. We all want to be good, to go along.
Doors close in long accordion patterns
following us in another us for losing ourselves
though already taken, over the years, lost loves:
the older the more there’s just remainders remaining:
couples never broken from innocence into the light:
abandoned movies given in to their own automatic motions, leaving
habitually: a world so large now it crosses its fingers in series of series
so serious, politicians are already pushing for a new highway
to open up the last backwoods, where I live
and you will never return, for a door, some keys passed between us,
and a storm. I will try again tomorrow to go home to Hualien,
to let go, open my heart more, be lost again and taken down.
