Three Poems

A Song’s Eyebrows
                  
What’s poorer than a bird’s toes?
 
Toes thinner than straw
sit on a tree branch, clutching the sunlight.
 
They become the tree’s eyebrows, complete its face.
A song’s eyebrows, the bird’s being completed by the song.
 
A hungry afternoon,
the bird flies into hunger, the poor sky turns clear.
 
Tracing the bird that flew hiding its thin toes
my pupils spread as bird echoes.



Around the Lake
                
I walked, along the moon’s outline I walked.
Sometimes it waned, some nights pear flowers withered. In the rock’s shadow you suddenly went cold. I won't say there were eyes trapped underwater. I won’t say the pupils filled up the lake.
The body’s sick,
that’s why apricot flowers bloomed. Someone told me that. The faint scent trickled down the valley.
I walked alongside it. Only the flower walked alone.
The faint scent of dry grass diffused from my molar.
It was a long white road,
 
leading straight to the silvery furrow.



A White Light
                  
I picked up a white light on the Okinawa beach. It was a whiteness I couldn’t call white.
You told me it was the ocean’s bones,
 
that it was made by hardened foamy waves,
tears that boiled and
hardened. Blinded by the tropical light I realized that feelings can sometimes be touched.
 
But in that light everything evaporates.
The brighter it is, the darker it gets.
Only those who’ve been pricked know how hard, how dangerous water is.
I only realized that after you left.
 
In the water dark with sugar cane leaves
there’s a damp, dark valley.
Did the wandering beast lie here as a bone?
 
The blinding bones of time
roll in waves,
shine whitely in birth and death, birth and death.