Shorthand in Leather Glove

1.
And what of those miniature gestures
meaning sepulcher, fusion, colossus?

Lines resembling my signature after fracture.
Name without identity.
Illegible scrawl

Reassembling the silhouette of mountains.

Elegant lineage (as in beauty), distinguishing mark (as in truth).
Unrepeatable river.

Recognizable shape among intimates.
Ashes, not really ashes
but bits of crumbled bone.

Sign at the beginning of passage.
Music.
The black box next to which we sputter:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

Stones. Bones of the earth.

2.
The Taiwanese painter upstairs in his green room

paints a painting of a rock. Rock after rock after rock

Appearing not outside (as in nature), not even in his mind (as in memory),

but somewhere inside (tradition? practice? DNA?) his hand.

After rock, I would have learned pond, and after pond,

lake, tree, and eventually bird.

Birds, the culmination

unless I’d painted the human face

Of moon over river, water buffalo sloshing

through rows of rice, next to the road

Where I peddled my bicycle

past narrow-necked pots stacked thirty feet high

And stashed full of human bones. The intimacy

of people and stones

In a single contemplative stroke —

3.
I will never be a Buddhist

though meditation wakes us. How quiet

The room. Nights with only a candle. Turning

my head in reverse, my feet

at rest on the pillow

And pressed against headboard of mud wall

soothed by my palms

And psalms of those I’ve loved.


Powdered orange dirt, brittle sage

fleck and roll to the horizon.

Sangre de Cristos to the east, Tres Piedras

to the west. Not that anyone knows

Who those rough initials belong to, eruptions

in longhand, beginnings

To what we know.