You look into a stone and see its early fire.
You look into a fire and all you see is fire.
The reason that we saw each other only twice
is that I have no hands to thrust into the fire.
Time is a river. That is if you are a fish.
If you are a sunflower, time is a fire.
We do not ever know what the gods want of us.
Perhaps that is why we compare them to fire.
A charred library is sadder than a pile of ash.
A body catches but it does not cage a fire.
Saying it makes no difference to the universe
but when did saying anything put out a fire?
Sick of analogies, Jee wants the thing itself.
What are you, Love, when you are not a fire?
*
Among the ways to take a good look at a tree,
the best is to lie down and look up at a tree.
I can no more hold you by naming qualities
than sacred names etched in the bark possess the tree.
All that I touch of you are touches and not you.
A torn branch does not make the tree less of a tree.
Your life – your speed – moves independently of mine.
Looking elsewhere does not hasten or slow the tree.
Being is your glory, which no one can take from you,
unless they take you down, for burial, from the tree.
The angel of despair, the demon of desire,
the many leaves that flutter on a lonely tree.
Jee, lay your anguish on the ground and look up.
The tree. The sky. The tree. The sky held by the tree.
*
I close the door but the day climbs in through a window.
Other days long thought dead follow it through the window.
Mad with us – or with dad – you turned us out. We walked
and turned but could not see your face at the small window.
You wheeled your bike past the window, and Dad was home.
I circled, with metallic clicks, the five o’clock window.
The windows, grilled to baffle body, locked us out,
but a wire finger opened the door through a window.
To cut my losses I chalk round me an endless circle.
To stop the train from crashing in I close the window.
Inside the restaurant, I watched you hurry in,
watched you, first, through the window, then, without the window.
Jee gives his dad the name of love, his mum, of loss.
She closed the door on us but, Love, he cleaned the windows.
*
You smell your fault as readily as you hear a bell.
Ignorance rings a school bell, ego a church bell.
The loop of wire moves along the twist of wire.
Steady your hand or desire will sound the bell.
I ache for the beautiful young men I pass on streets.
They do not know they are beautiful bronze bells.
Out of the party chatter rises a cathedral.
My tongue keeps ringing my head that is the bell.
He has heard of, but has not heard, the onehand clap.
He has tapped many bodies but has not heard the bell.
I hope perfection does not lie in quietness.
A poet builds his house in the fading of a bell.
The fading is a fault but silence is an itch.
Most unendurable, Jee, is the unrelenting bell.