a wink of memory

These tales she tells are as real as rainwater under the next day's sun,
and still she tells them anyway

the way a film developer flips through your pics and imagines being there

except these pics are too volumnous for one head to hold
so she selects the grandest three - the water buffalo, of eating discolored apples,
ordering buttermilk because she loved its two ingredients -
and repeats them like mantra

for she knows memory is fallible
for a long time she held grandfather's scent
once lost it could not be relearned

hence each telling of each tale reminds her anew
of our lie that humans have roots

jinmen 1978

footsteps echo through
dank caverns lit by lonely bulbs
that played off the eddies in these

canals beneath jinmen island
where ships once hid in caverns
and shells contained leaflets

of propaganda for fatigued sons
of the ones who built the caverns
and knew that bombs would fall

every monday wednesday friday
and in turn sent out shells on
tuesday thursday saturday

to tell the other side about 'jinmen'
just as the artillery shells addressed
themselves to 'citizens of quemoy'

What Che Never Did

Revolution leaves holes and
trenches once packed with earth.
Then the fun begins
as those who dug decide on
how to fill these sudden spaces.

Lagoon

I wonder what happens when what
we imagine does not manifest,
shriveling without warmth and withering,
neural tree limbs gone unwatered and
gray yet hanging in the air, still.

If dead thought sprouts dead limbs
then there's work to do in metaphor:
revolution a hole in the ground
freedom your average bird without wings
and hate springs from nothing but a flower

The wind blows west across the sharded
beach on which I sit and think and ruminate of
the heavens, with trees not birch but palm and earth
not stone but sandy. A rounded dream-piece
catches my eye and on buckled knees
I reach down, down to where fingers brush
against the earth and its grit worms
into the gap between nail and index finger

as I bend the end of it and encircle my
geological find, this oval worn smooth by waves,
in the crook of my index finger,
taking care to keep my thoughts as my arm
extends, the rock skips away, another dream
sent skipping atop the tides.