I am angling for a dream that will not come.
The ginkgoes have shed; like them, laden with air,
I come up empty. Fistfuls of gold, crumbling.
Wide-eyed and winsome, dandelion grass
tethered in smoke. The house, its fond eyes,
are yellow like its doors. I pull them
from my memory. A cup: browning, shrunk
with age. The heaping of the years is transference—
a girl is older who never grew up. Her hands
stick with poems. Ghosts of tadpoles, frog eggs
like netted seafoam, gossamer, clinging to devil’s ivy.
Hold for the worlds; live only a little.
Rain crashes on cold pebbles.
The frogs, dissonant with desire. The scent
of rainwater indistinguishable from sweat.
My father’s corpse on a wicker chair,
poised as if he were still sleeping. The cat
by his feet, curled up on amber tile.
Horus, I call, until my voice becomes
a whisper. I think the house holds
his ghost in its cupped, yellow hands.
I think it held mine—haunted my father
to death. I know he haunted me, his ghost
my yearning: absence that spills and spills.
My father’s last breath—a teetering raindrop,
splattered on ash. His wife says they cut down
the bamboo shoots of my childhood.
The only percussion now is the rattling
railway, the boisterous frogs, begging,
come back, come back, come home.
from Monsoon Daughter, forthcoming chapbook
