"Even now, we, or they,
are building the time machine. They are building it, or
we are building it, out of the punctuation, the commas
and the periods, the pauses, and the full stops
removed from the jagged sentences that they, or we,
will stop themselves, or ourselves, from ever writing."
"Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps
behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference?
Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the
rest is hypothesis and dream."
"A woman is waiting
I do not know how much longer she must attend
In silence to the memory of water.
My own hands are empty
There is nothing to hold."
#TodaysPoem#poetry@poetry
Prescription for Water by Jiameng Xu
collected in The Covid Journals (2023 University of Alberta Press)
edited by Shane Neilson, Sarah Fraser and Arundhati Dhara https://tinyurl.com/4s3mhuzf
"The colours of their middle-age
are a midsummer tease, matching
hues, bluing into blue into bluish-
white in the distance. So here we are
too, a gallery of gazes
looking on these affairs—easy
chairs on the veranda."
"now trace a breath-map in the air. how invisible?
is a rose a turning cylinder of senses? how unspeakable
is this the ghost of the heart, the actual
the inmost deceleration of its thought? how unspeakable
is everything still speeding around us?"
"She hovers at the window, alert to how the house breathes, exhalations as the front door opens, shudders. She hears movement. Footfalls, creaks, the downstairs kitchen cupboards. House-breaths rattle her apartment door the slightest, ripple. If the house was a body, the hallway and the staircase might be lungs."
"firefighters have been tirelessly protecting
I want to hug them and say thank you
can’t extinguish the fear and anxiety
we live in a different world now."
"I choose, for moderate comfort, a thin tree
whose tallest branch has yet one leaf
hunched brown. A flag? Defiance? Obstinance?
A declaration I suppose.
I make it mine."
"while in heaven right next door somebody has plugged
a radio into a long extension cord and music from the local radio station has scared
the raccoons away and bushels of corn are picked by a woman who loves the feel
of the perfect ears in her hands because this is her heaven you see not the heaven
of raccoons"