Two Poems

Kite Festival

As the sun cauterized, the kites began their crumpled descent

from dragon to dithering rat, snaking at the ankles

of toddlers. Why now, from the balcony of another city,

am I thinking of you: diseased language,

that spit and crackled at me on the train. Men,

and women becoming men, thrummed

like light passing through a subway, picking up clicks

and swoops and flashes, where I was posed,

permanently, as a woman abroad. From my pilgrim’s lookout

I could watch how the wind jimmied

the remainders. Rustled the tarps. The only kite master still on the field

kicked at the falling animals, collected their strings, mourned

their ghosts. Only the lucky ones

catch a break of wind. Only I

can fly home for a summer. He paced between the two rams,

who had just been felled from their place above him.

He doesn’t speak to me, not in my dreams nor my solitude,

where I am in any-city, where I can choose what to remember:

a blonde head in the lake, glitter woven into a black sweater, 2.99 or maybe

cheaper, his headphones slung over one shoulder, Lucy at her desk

with impossible cheeks, Vincent sleeping above and around me, his honesty,

George’s concern, his fruit baskets, the snow that stayed for impossible

years.

The kite master knows this: when we are formed by memories

and impatience, there will be nothing left to rummage through in the mud.

My student has her foot amputated / I meet you on the platform in Beijing

I’m thinking about your poem while trying to write my poem,

while trying to watch that movie about houses,

and when the phone rings, I’m thinking about phones,

for a minute, then I start thinking about how if light

were a number it would be 0, so that it could both

exist and still be a muddle. The train shuddered in like spring.

Like cells and flowers budding time-lapsed through snow.

I walked along the track as the faces became a dirty

swipe of grey. Once, I tried to capture your hand

opening inside my head, but no one would buy it.

I have come here again and again, editing, enhance, enhance,

trying to find your face in that unusable disaster.

They told our Li Xian, now club-footed,

that she can’t play like the others, can always only goalie, diving-

board dip, kitchen-table lean. She was only ten and they hung her necktie

from the flagpole. I can’t touch that phantom hurt. I can only swing at it,

speeding at the speed of zero, each minute you're at work, each cell

that zooms, becomes music, becomes a pool of ink in all my brain's dips

and swoops. When we come home and I still haven’t read the poem,

and it’s dark and you’re reading it to yourself, I hear myself in the other room

with you, simple and clear, praising that moment of peace in you.