My fingers
are ten Chinese poems,
my thoughts: Christmas lights
wound around my persona:
a thousand little bulbs obscuring the darkness

The nights tumble through the noise of breathing,
which wipes the moon from the pond's surface
and leaves me alone
with my eyes.

Metabolism keeps me glowing
beneath the stars;
lettuce and leaping fish,
wild strawberries and the grains of the fields

But the years pass heavily in thin veils;
my body a shadow in the light;
life an unforeseen interference,
faint across the laconic non-being of emptiness;
a detour in the silence of origin,
in the death-silent roaring of the rudd with its mouth open
beneath the water mirror's lack of evidence