青 / Qing Ghazitsu

Nervose winter. Above nodes of town houses, eucalypts send dendritic fingers into 青,
then synapse into sky, distance’s true 青.

Midlife, with knots along the seam. The promise, still, of unhemmed happiness,
while each day the creases stiffening: ambitions unborn, missed collisions. Unlike who? 青.

When met with regret, emptiness can reveal gaps in its own thinking: its tendency, when repeated, to thicken into feeling.
As in this afternoon of absence sagged on the couch. Its nagging to fill inner rooms: a déjà vu 情.

If a body full of holes can no longer hold loss,
does its scaffolding forget what to do, 擎?

To remain in one state is to become orificed by moth. Scrap of a poem, miscarried. Half-eaten orange, azure-maned with mold.
My fruits flea-bitten, I finger the half-life of Sylvia’s silk screen, fossilized with petroleum-blue 蜻.

Shadow of a plane chafing the memory of a cabin’s cottoned oxygen. All those years, empty, in the air.
I entered no temples. Ignored joy flocked across ponds for its spotted residue: 鲭.

Suburb’s dusky utterances. Traffic, chromatic in key. Monotony scraping against bare strands of thought.
Chord of a dog’s duplicated bark. And a longed-for voice, limpid, into scar tissue, 倾.

Suffering is porous, even when viewed through translucencies. Of a land’s inhabitants, it scatters.
Rapture narrowed to the thickness of a phone screen, figures fleeing drones proliferate into 晴.

Who was it that spoke of a life without attachments as lightness? Oddly, not a poet.
Still, I refuse to thin my sentences to threads. Slew 轻.

Balcony’s liminality, before the congestion of morning. Laundry, on the deck chair, paused.
Unfolding, exquisitely, one’s own corners. Then, from below the center: another exhaling into smoke that twice blew 氰.

Syringed of all feeling, I study the ruptured vein
splitting my forearm. Its broken-through 靘.

Night climbs vines of hopelessness. Thriving, interminably, with the insistence of the deciduous:
intimacy’s thickenings. Roots, the wooly nest of them. This light spiking in from the street—from the bamboo 箐.

Let me stay with this ash of nostalgia.
Some patinas must be left for beauty, the way this copper pot is not due 清.

Yes, I can temper grief rising to a low simmer,
but no, not how it arrives—sock-footed, without thank you, 请.

Dawn. The sky a mirror, like the one the poet 李 Shangyin wrote of centuries ago.
Clouded with longing, he knew he was far from Mount Penglai. Knew what would never ensue: 綮.