As Far As Cho-Fu-Sa -- Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

As Far As Cho-Fu-Sa
by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta

If you are coming down the narrows of the river Kiang,
let me know beforehand and I will come out to meet you
as far as Cho-Fu-Sa.

-Li Po, “The River Merchant’s Wife,”
as translated by Ezra Pound

 

What I am, ever, is this: composure of stone.
Spare weather visiting the garden, small as the hours
I keep watch by. Beyond this wall

Must be better weathers. This claw of stars
Must constellate somewhere into a bear,
Else names would lie.

Since winter’s thaws, no script from you
Save this: “I travel the river and follow
The white gulls—”

Husband. See me walking the dusty pass
Where loom our prior lives?
Here the years pass that I enshrine

Within these walls, sparing nothing
From the ardors of my stare. Blue plums,
Paired butterflies repeat you

In a walled world. I tell myself
To clear the moss, mend the gate
So long unswayed and caked with dirt,

But nothing moves. Somewhere
You are actual. Happen to me there. 

Request

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

I've been a member here for over 6 years and this is my first request to the moderators: Please do something about the spam!

Does LJ not support some sort of spam-filter you can use, or perhaps add a Captcha to all comments? I am just curious -- I understand that you may not have these answers.

Thank you!

Robert Graves; Not Dead

[mariashes.livejournal.com]

Walking through trees to cool my heat and pain,
I know that David’s with me here again.
All that is simple, happy, strong, he is.
Caressingly I stroke
Rough bark of the friendly oak.
A brook goes bubbling by: the voice is his.
Turf burns with pleasant smoke;
I laugh at chaffinch and at primroses.
All that is simple, happy, strong, he is.
Over the whole wood in a little while
Breaks his slow smile.

from 'The World Doesn't End' by Charles Simic

[empty-room.livejournal.com]

He had mixed up the characters in the long novel he was writing. He forgot who they were and what they did. A dead woman reappeared when it was time for dinner. A door-to-door salesman emerged out of a backwoods trailer wearing Chinese robes. The day the murderer was supposed to be electrocuted, he was buying flowers for a certain Rita, who turned out to be a ten-year-old girl with thick glasses and braids... And so it went.

He never did anything for me, though. I kept growing older and grumpier, as I was supposed to, in a ratty little town which he always described as "dead" and "near nothing."

Ghosts // Marge Piercy

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

The skin falls like leaves
in slow motion, I know it,
is sifted and shifted
by the wind like a dune.
The skin that knew you
seven years back
has sluffed and grown part
of another, some cow,
an oak tree, a crow.

The years wear holes in us,
what looks solid as sheet
metal, one morning the glass
face of the next building
peers through. Theories, rhetoric
fade like a Mail Pouch ad
on an old barn, but the structure
stands firm while the winds
howl through the necessary cracks.

What lives of the woman who
loved you? The fears that twittered
stripping me bare and bony
have risen in a shrill flock
and settled in younger women.
I worry about money
but rarely about my face,
responsibilities hang at my tits
squealing and fat as baby pigs.

Your ghost curls floating in the closed
waters of dream. Your mouth
moves on my throat in the dark,
my hands exactly form your back,
unscalded by the blood of our parting.
I wake trembling in a body you never
touched, while past the curve of the earth
you sleep. Time thickens you.
On the street would I know your face?