Sipping dew to stretch out your life? Emperor Wu tried that trick and you know where to find him. Meanwhile the Huai River still floods each spring. Nothing wrong with growing old—it sounds like Chrysanthemum in Chinese or used to, long ago. The water rises once more. Watch the yellow petals float up in your …
Once a boy slipped down a well in far Anhui. He surfaced deep in Mongolia, whispering through his fever of the vast, star-clotted sky he swam beneath. Once I called down into that dark glitter— then cursed, then bargained, then begged—until someone else called back.
Whether it was your sister or your girlfriend doesn’t matter. We got her. I am writing this to say peanut butter makes great bait. Dear mouse behind my bookshelf, a cockroach can live for nine days without its head before it starves to death. May you be so lucky.
Dabbing lather across my chin, I picture you: bent low over the tap, drinking from your cupped hands. You probably aren’t even up yet. Hair a tangle on the covers, eyelids made pale by the sun. Sweeping the back step I find a cricket, wings laced with frost. The leaves keep falling. I look for …
The sun breaks like an egg over everything east of here. Stop stop, enough enough, the sparrows say—or that’s what Lao Wen says they say in Chinese. Take your tarnished horn, your wooden flute and break this silence—alone beside the dark water, desperate for the birds to get to work—delicate as the last skin of …