Well, it was a long trip to take to make a good friend rant about a poetry book. (Seeing Chris and her family, and getting a new job, not our toast, was the goal of the trip).
Down the Mountain
Take Me as nothing left
lift me twisted through granit and moss
water lung, milk waist, sage
I pass through these pages like a ghost
erase my shape in the sun on the porch
brown my skin into the riverbed
push my words into a lullaby
paper lung
milk waist and sage
whatever I came with exhausted
I pass through these pages like a ghost
whatever I came with I spent
The poems range from quirky and lyrical family stories ("Mom Says Stalin was a Bad Communist") to pieces full of strange, isolated-figure juxtapositions as she writes about illness and the skinless way we feel when we fear we're sick and can't recover, to these striking two-language poems that reflect her life in Japan and her bi-lingual interest in how words make people imagine their lives in different languages. So, as the end of "Woman Under Trees" shows us:
ama
ocean woman:
a woman diving for shells
kan
three women:
wickedness and mischief
ameonna
rain woman:
a woman who brings rain
It doesn't make as much sense without the beginning, but I'll let Judy's poem close this entry; the poems finishes with:
these words flood into the river
they are trees that rise uprooted
they are butterflies in the trees
