Carcanet Poetry

I touch your cheek to protect you

I loved those days! each one exactly like its predecessor.
There were the stone steps we climbed together
and the little town where we breakfasted. Very far away,
I could see the cove where we used to swim, but not hear anymore
the children calling out to one another, nor hear
you anymore, asking me if I would like a cold drink,
which I always would.

When the postcards stopped, I read the old ones again.
I saw myself standing under the balcony in that rain
of foil-covered kisses, unable to believe you would abandon me,
begging you, of course, though not in words

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away

One day an envelope arrived,
bearing stamps from a small European republic.
This the concierge handed me with an air of great ceremony;
I tried to open it in the same spirit.
Inside was my passport.
There was my face, or what had been my face
at some point, deep in the past.
But I had parted ways with it,
that face smiling with such conviction,
filled with all the memories of our travels together
and our dreams of other journeys—
I threw it into the sea.
It sank immediately.

I see, he said, that you no longer
wish to resume your former life,
to move, that is, in a straight line as time
suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake)
in a circle which aspires to
that stillness at the heart of things,
though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock

The book contains
only recipes for winter, when life is hard. In spring,
anyone can make a fine meal

I was not
permitted to prune it but I held the bowl in my hands,
a pine blowing in high wind
like man in the universe.

But the trees were everything.
And how sad we were when one died,
and they do die, despite having been
removed from nature; all things die eventually.
I minded most with the ones that lost their leaves,
which would pile up on the moss and stones—
The trees were miniature, as I have said,
but there is no such thing as death in miniature.

It was as dark as it would ever be
but then I knew to expect this,
the month being December, the month of darkness.
It was early morning. I was walking
from my room to the arboretum; for obvious reasons,
we were encouraged never to be alone,
but exceptions were made— I could see
the arboretum glowing across the snow;
the trees had been hung with tiny lights,
I remember thinking how they must be
visible from far away, not that we went, mainly,
far away— Everything was still.
In the kitchen, sandwiches were being wrapped for market.
My friend used to do this work.
Huli songli, our instructor called her,
giver of care. I remember
watching her: inside the door,
procedures written on a card in Chinese characters
translated as the same things in the same order,
and underneath: We have deprived them of their origins,
they have come to need us now