Intimacy

Hirsoshige must have understood proportion
in his print “Evening Squall at Ōhashi”:
the smallness of men under a prodigious storm.

Night of folding umbrellas and a harvest
of shadows, I set out on foot
and ducked into the covered shopping arcade

on Teramachi and took my dinner
there at my favorite tonkatsu restaurant.
Rain kept pouring and singing in the gutters.

I remembered taking a shower
with my two big sisters when they were still
part boy, hairless below with swoosh lines,

no breasts to speak of. I was but a twig
enclosed by the tan barks of madrones.
My young sisters towering over me,

and tonight I am wholly honored
by this intimate memory.
On BBC World I watched a news item

about a seventeen year old girl
dragged by the hair then kicked
and stoned to death by her brothers

for being with a man rumored to be her lover.
In Kurosawa’s Roshomon, the thief
scoffs at the priest, “If it’s a sermon,

I’d rather listen to the rain.”
What punishment would you heap
upon my sisters who harbor

such an intimacy? It is raining
in the ancient city, so much rain!
I am small in the rain.

Notes from My Lovely Assistant

Seventeen Syllables

He was a jewel of selflessness before there was a moon. That’s how I thought of him when I saw his moves. Such coolness, too, in his movie-speak when he jostles with the clerks at Blockbuster! My friends congratulate me for finding such a catch. “Oh, he’s a smooth one!” they’d say to me. My BF recalls the wide river of his past and reduces it to a street when he was five. “Something bright is shining there,” is a seven-syllable line from his “haiku in progress.” When he comes home, he’ll tell me something important that I didn’t know before.

Thirty-one Syllables

There is always control. The knife comes fast. If I were philosophic, I’d say that it’s an ability to see things plainly. His throwing hand is precise, severe in its effectiveness, almost cruel. These days, our gigs fly by. How to slow things down is what I can’t ask him. What can he do to make our job feel more than what it is? What can a knife thrower say that would make me less fictive? The knife’s destiny is not tied to mine. I smile to a gasping audience, my image is exact and without fanfare.

Oraga Haru

What slips away might be the very thing I need to keep. I should have been a tree, spellbound, a discontented woman clinging to the earth. I am a target girl, a hole in the tree for you to pucker up, or whisper. Gods don’t ask for my name. I’m just given one and told to say yes and yes and sometimes no.