Astronomical Winter

One day you’re the new kid, not just new to the planet but new to a family, new to a school. Then, after what seems like only days, no one considers you a child anymore, yet there is still so much you don’t know. And before long, you are a docent, leading tours through hallways and musing aloud. When you turn your head, you see a stream of followers with headsets trailing behind you. What they aren’t privy to is that you make up stories as you go; that you and the tour, against all odds, are bound together; and with no destination you are always anchored to one spot in time. But you suspect, nevertheless, you have grown up when you weren’t looking—not because of your size, which, after having expanded for a brief period, is now compressing, becoming denser; not because of the hardened leather storage trunk of memories by the heel of your bed where a mysterious gnome has been rummaging and purloining prized objects—and then, scatters before sunup, leaving teeny shoes to let you know he trod there; but because of the number of global calamities that have occurred on your watch, the burning and blasting of lung and limb and lineage. Count them: radially spreading from fear, vertically accreting like birthdays blowing out wishes, or anti-birthdays blowing up dreams.

The Tongue-Cut Sparrow and Badger Teapot

For Elaine Equi

“Sparrow, oh sparrow,
Oh where is the home of the sparrow?”

—舌切り雀, Shita-kiri Suzume, retold by Momoko Ishii

Wifey dares to speak her mind freely, a mind that delights in freeing a bird’s tongue to wander into a forest of wagging tongue trees. Wifey owns a tea kettle badger that flies when her water boils, pours in all directions at its own discretion. Even the story, itself, sides with the husband, who can’t command the tea kettle badger to behave, and although the husband tried to steal and sell it to an interstitial diamond dealer, it always returns to wifey’s kitchen. After she loaned it to a priest, it was sainted, so now no one minds its rage, and some even mistake its boiling for the quiet breath of a sage. Then, once upon a time, the tale cants, in the middle of a white lying night, husband abandons wife in search of a freed birdsong at the sleeping mountain’s foot. (Sometimes the mountain sleepwalks, and on such occasions, it slips into the night, and in its slippers, shuffles out of sight). Wagging tongues tell of clipped lingua, tell of a tongueless bird that found her voice at a karaoke cafe in the cave of an echoey conked-out mountain. A child once wisely asked, “Why would anyone side with a wife’s songless cacophonous cawing? Her earsplitting warble that fells hollow, fallow forest trees? After all, it was the husband who lusted after the bird’s sweet melody which, of course, tormented the stewing wife and caused her to liberate it. Now, when wives knit tales—sipping a spot of oily tea—ears that encircle them are especially drawn to yarns about tongues cut loose and roiling badger kettles. Libraries are filled with such bird tracks, such ditties. The irony.

The Last Hotel

“The ice thing only dripped and stared
And Ida mad knew goblins had been there.”

—from Outside Over There, Maurice Sendak

“Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-être.”
[I am going to seek the great perhaps.]

—François Rabelais

Toss us to Thanatos, our other asleep in another on a bridgeless moonless night, on a goblin wedding site, the melting bride mumbles “I d…,” then tumbles a reeking bouquet of death into time’s delicate hands to catch the married breath of our last heartbeat that beats out of us.

Raven beats its feathered fingers and cracks souls that roll off fleshy rinds. Raven scales the open air, bears messages from ouroboric mom, our robotic mom, her pearly teeth tunnel to red-tongued Earth with musical clefts and echoey chasms. Raven breathing in mom’s heartbeat, beating out our breath.

We are gray now, Milky Way gray, gray like a spray of florets draped on the earth by granite stones sprung as torsos from Earth. We are packed in pine trunks for travel, shoveled below silky-skinned cedar trunks whose long, ropy roots tie us to this dock before we travel farther out to sea to the other shore.

Candy House of Compassion

Dreamsicle Gretel
arrives at the pine forest midsentence.
Three-sized bowls
served at the silent retreat,
each imperfectly perfect,

and a thousand-handed
handsome Hansel—
hazel eyed—in the heart of
compassionate palms,

who sits astride a lotus pad
haunting memory, nostalgia—
as Avalokitesvara—looks down
at sound, perceives
the heart’s lamentations.

A temple of sweets tempers
nonbinary bodhisattvas. Boneless
fingers figuring, streaming
from the source of candied
delusion, purified by fire’s heart.

The Empress of Void Leads the Parade