|
Yun Wang
Space Journal: The Garden
Wind whips air into snowflakes.
The mind rises, buoyant
over skeletal crystals.
I reach out my hands.
The stars listen.
In this scenario I explore
the physiology of wings. They begin
to grow on my back ribs.
I try not to scratch.
The current of time slows, loops into a pond.
I look into the water's black mirror and see
weeping cherry blossoms.
Light floods. Naked limbs of white maples
stretch into an eggshell sky.
The Fish Dream
Against the glass, whirled reflections of a green hummingbird.
The sun warms red nectar in the lantern-shaped feeder. Four times
farther out than the Earth, Jupiter orbits the Sun with its
entourage of moons.
A six pound carp leaped into my lap, its round mouth reached for
my breasts. I jumped and saw a black pond in which galaxies swim.
Two young galaxies brush shoulders. Each grows arms, spirals of
blue and white stars.
The hummingbird enters the open glass door, pecks the white wall,
then another white wall. His intermittent swirls echo in the room.
"Feel the wind," I tell him. He dashes to the corner, disappears
behind an unused screen. I lift the screen. He is frozen, with one
wing folded.
My baby puckers up in his sleep, suckles on moist air tinted with
magnolia.
In a quantum foam of fluctuating space and time, the Universe was
born. Our minds peck against walls of unknown thickness. In Pakistani
mountains' dark bellies, a mad man nourished by tribal deliveries
plots the destruction of innocent millions. On an icy moon of Jupiter,
evolution awaits.
Baby in one arm, I scoop up the hummingbird with my other hand.
He is motionless, warm. I step outside the door, open my hand:
he soars into the sky in a green flash.
©2008 by Yun Wang
Yun Wang's first poetry book, titled
The Book of Jade (2002), won the Nicholas
Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press.
Her poetry chap book, The Carp (1994), was published by Bull Thistle
Press. She has published poems in numerous literary journals,
including the Kenyon Review, Green Mountains Review, International
Quarterly, Poet Lore, and many others. She makes her living as a
cosmologist.
|
