Collage of Seoul. Jae Newman

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      Mother Tree

      I am free

      cut loose from

      the branches of the Mother Tree,

      surrendered

      to the fostered fingers of a silver bird.

      I was nine

      when I found you, planted,

      arms part of an unreachable sky.

      Running alone at dusk,

      I cried for your attention

      the single time in my life

      pointing at a bloody shin.

      I wanted you to see

      what a snapped-back branch had done to me.

      On a hill in the woods, I wiped blood away

      until all the leaves were red, then

      stood up, your roots quivering

      as I kissed the bark, gripped an ax.

      Pushing Chi

      If these hands cannot conceive

      what I see,

      cannot understand his left

      from mine, then

      I exist in compromise

      alone.

      I have not come this far

      in self-definition

      to risk it all on one move,

      but my spirit

      knows why I must try.

      Here I am, directing

      two forces in opposition:

      push and pull.

      I know this. I am this

      and yet,

      I struggle to keep pace,

      a move behind

      the man on a video,

      a master

      whose breath is invisible,

      if taken at all.

      Aureole

      This same poem, unsaid,

      in a thousand lonely mouths,

      each holding a pencil

      torching lead love letters

      in long, arching graphite rainbows.

      Jasmine leaves shade the light

      but when the sun sets,

      when everything is dark,

      when my eyes are worthless,

      my heaven is always only

      an inch away from the world.

      It is the distance my fingers travel

      when I touch your spine,

      the center of the universe,

      reciting those archaic words, I love you.

      Adrenal ash spread over the lip

      of a blue flame; love; water

      on the orchid of wanting

      to be found and clipped by you.

      This vase, Pyrex, is a bed, of course,

      as my hand, lost in the tectonics of your back,

      removes the cosmos with my daily trespass,

      as fingers climb that little mountain

      where enlightenment is held in an open box

      by Aurora, who greets me coldly,

      in white gloves. Even a goddess knows

      that her hands are not fit to hold my love of you,

      the words of a love child

      closing the distance of a god

      down to the length of a ring finger.

      Postage

      Leafing through pages

      of a phone book in dream,

      I cut my tongue on a Korean War stamp

      before noticing

      a million of them,

      spilling from the blackness of a woman’s purse.

      Collage of Seoul

      Taped over the headboard, eleven photos

      of her neckline

      a river splashing through

      the wound.

      Framed in a golden tomb, the cries of my mother

      freeze most specks of traffic.

      Tiny cars

      pass over bridges, some

      never return.

      Adrift

      Cottonwood in static suspension—

      it covers the neighbor’s lawn.

      Mid-May, we talk of moving

      again. She says we should stay

      and I always want to go

      somewhere new

      and redefine ourselves perpetually

      as newlyweds, as

      the couple who can not

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