Cicadas in the Garden
i
and
in the morning, our tongues opened to the sun
awoke and tumbling, we tripped over our shadows in the corner of the kitchen
love providential
and the sun as loud as the artillery explosions constellating the countryside
and the sound of your heart at run
"It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream.”
Nostalgia that twinned-way heart journey,
breaking and healing over the train clacking
of touch and story
and hope horizontal sifting slightly, left
Twinned and beleaguered your beloved
as near this long-lost coming toward,
rhyming, always rhyming
“It seems to me you are trying to crack open a dream.”
a dolphin chirping next to a boat, suddenly
a dorsal rainbow over a cruise ship locked in a Charleston dock,
Pollyanna tucked in for the night, thin out from the carnival’s dancing
and in the morning, cicadas in the garden singing
bright bars of tune-measure that fall upon us like timbre tiptoed and light
the thin, cinnamon light.
ii
and
there you go rhyming once again the scribbles of life
humming yourself into stanza and meter, even amid grief
that line that encircles the kitchen shadows and holds each of us in place,
the outline that brings the color taken and chalked behind your stepping
passing palimpsests lit up on the wall of the bedroom at night, the passing
traffic and transportation lights swaying up the corner
rapping up the quotidian and softened bodies in the grind of night--
the absences, their infinite shells, the jewel in the net, the lotus and the lore
the lair filled by dragon stone and dream
her demands and his awkward commands
and in the morning all that which slid under our eyes and coiled our heads left written
on our heart-bones all along
and
“I am waiting.”
So we write that upon the scars of the river and the apples into bottles strung from a tree on the hill
turned recalled memory into Calvados, fallen upon the shy shadows imprinted in the waiting grass, underneath us, here
tsundoku
our names tributaries in the country of the country of the landscape at night
iii
and again, recall
our tongues open to the sun, long round the red and rung mountainous air, a tram gambols at the pace of loss and you turn toward the east where the peninsula buckles from your pivot
the lighthouse and sentry still in their encampment over the Cape, the birds song your name over the dunes of Hatteras, beaking rhyme and rotor and we stood among the away
and trading tempers takes us wingward, along and alone the Ambergris hour the trains distant
the cicadas in the garden singing long and our tongues open to the light
touching us once again at angles
peculiar and unlocked, our hearts held just long enough
and the chorus of the grass and your small hands untying secrets of our life unscramble and upright.
for: Chiwan Choi
