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The hay rake’s rattle, the stunned sputter of a moccasin

Slung in the blades, the mid-gloam crickets sending

Their codes as though from a nearby country of dreamers.

Each sound found its shape – low drip into mud beneath

The leaking spigot, scrape of sparrows stowing twigs

In the eaves, the combines fading, unzipping the bean

Rows and back again, and the wind-combed drift

Of dust in the field, which is where I can hear it most

Clearly now, my pointing the direction away

From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am…

Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.

I do not know how I need the air,

or if it needs me. The lost air,

the air which is smashed, like a red hat.

When the sun rises the amnesty

of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,

the maroon horses - when the sun rises

the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard

with a thumb on top.

My grandmother owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions. The stories were fantastic, yet I believed them. She said that when she was young fireflies had invaded her town, so the whole town was lighted even during the nighttime. She said she had been told that the summer she was born, strange clouds passed through the sky. Every night for seven nights, a different cloud. The clouds all had a strange glow, as if someone had taken the moon and stretched it into a cloud shape. Those seven moon-clouds, she said, had been a lucky omen. As she spoke, she always gestured a great deal, so the background to her stories would be the soft tinkling of the bell we had bought her.

On the way home, going,

with the hill & mammoth clouds

behind me, rushing to the house

before the rain, those beautiful Pakistani girls,

their faces happy as poppies, I thought, those girls

rushing home as I was rushing home

to beat the first small pieces

of rain falling down

like nickels in departing light. There

was the laughing of the beautiful girls,

shrieking gulls, five or six of them (depending

on whether I count myself), the bright

& shining planets of their dresses

lifting, just so, in the wind. & their black hairs.

& the black sound of horses, horses

hoofing it home, the click

& clop of their patent leather hooves—Still, it touches

my ear, this sound. I touch

my heart. I can’t stop touching

my heart & saying, Today is my birthday,

you see? For the beautiful clamor of planets

dressed as girls who, running home, have heads.

Whose heads swing black night, running home

on the black feet of horses, from the rain.

Now I understand. Today is my birthday.

It is Thursday, my day. My black day.