Forbidden City

Asleep until noon, I'm dreaming

we've been granted another year.

You're here with me, healthy.

Then, half-awake, the half-truth—

this is our last day. Life's leaking

away again, and this time, we know it.

Dear body, I told you, pleading,

Don't Leave! but I understand you

can't say anything. Who are we?

Are we fictional? We don't look

like our pictures, don't look like

anyone I know. Daylight

flickers through a bamboo grove,

we approach the Forbidden City,

Looking together for the Hall

of Fulfilling Original Wishes.

Time is the treasure, you tell me,

and the past is its hiding place.

I instruct our fictional children,

The past is the treasure, time

is its hiding place. If we told him

how much we love him, how much

we miss him, he could stay.

But now you've taken me back

to Luoyang, to the Garden of Solitary Joy,

over a thousand years old—

I wake, I hold your hand, you let me go.

Copyright Credit: Gail Mazur, "Forbidden City" from Forbidden City. Copyright © 2016 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.

Source: Forbidden City (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)