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