On Knitting

Sitting in this dim room,
lit with the flickering television,
I am knitting this little cap.
pushing and pulling the needles,
weaving and half braiding
the yarn and time and my love
for the new child
of my own.

The strings pulled taut
cross over and over each other
like my memory of
the smaller and the younger and the before
and each one crosses over the next,
then through the holes that we made in each other;
and we move through them too
because sometimes holes don't mean broken,
but really mean there is just another way for the light to get in.

Before You

i am a bluetiredredscreamingcrazy person without you.
blue without and tired from thinking
and red from screaming and crying and trying to 
forget about you.
you are driving me crazy, (but always did).  


how did we end up like this?  
i loved you and (you loved me?) and i think what went wrong was
i gave up and i let you give up and you let me give up and you gave up.  And maybe
sometimes we just don't have the energy to not give up,
and that is how things go wrong.


i don't want to remember
but i want to remember how you were; instead
i remember how you ended up:
as one half of a broken us.


i am a bluetiredredscreamingcrazy person without you, 
but then again, i guess i was that before you too.

How I Learned to Use Chopsticks

I was sitting alone in the mall
carefully eating rice and vinegared vegetables
with hot strips of teriyaki meat.
Using chopsticks requires much concentration
and a strong sense of apathy
for how little of the food
makes it from the bowl to my mouth.

Sitting alone in the mall
staring at my fingers
willing them to work better
wondering
what I am doing wrong.
My sister uses chopsticks well
and I never understood why
because she speaks a few words of French
and I studied Chinese for three years
carefully pronouncing sounds, over and over, to make words
carefully drawing lines over and over to make sentences.

When I was learning to write, I held my pencil with two fingers on top, instead of one.
My teachers and parents used to watch
and say something bad would happen.
I was so small, and the situation sounded so dire
but I couldn't figure what was I doing wrong.

Sitting alone in the mall, practicing with chopsticks
almost as a meditation
I move my fingers up and down one at a time,
practicing the movements: 1, 2, 1, 2, up, down, up, down.
Open, close. Open. Close.
And I saw it then; I was holding one chopstick just as I held my pencil as a child.

I don't think I know

Sometimes I think I am too much, and sometimes not enough but all along I know it's not about more or less but being lost.

Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be a another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for me.

-Pablo Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin

27

in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

-before leaving my room
i turn, and(stooping
through the morning)kiss
this pilow, dear
where our heads lived and were

-e e cummings