Three poems

Because for once, there are no stories to tell, or there is nothing I want to talk about--not that everything is great, lah-di-dah. I just can't seem to make things funny, which, as you might have noticed, is how I confess. So here are three poems/confessions:


1.
Birth Order

Because I was guilty
not being a good sister
I worked on homework
I must have done ten years ago.
She stayed up late
with me: Guilty too, perhaps
of always asking for help
and always getting it.
So we spent the night going over
formulas, patterns
over and over
feeling holes, filling blanks.
As if this were all
of life--hollows to be filled
with what fits for the moment,
why we practiced
on shape-sorter toys:
Trials and errors we live through
to get it right. Years later,
we get it: Square peg, square hole.
As if it were fit that bound us--
not love, not blood
but birth order: Guilt
relative to one another.


2.
Letter to a John
aaaaaaa(or, Elderly Woman Behind a Counter in a Small Town... aaaaaaaaaTalking to Herself)

I love you.
Or I loved you--

Time, memory
I've learned not to trust them.

See, if I told you a story:
Two strangers meeting
In a country not their own
Falling in love, living together, lah-di-dah--

Say it ends with them
Returned to lives that used to be
Stories they'd tell one another--

Story, truth
These words interchangeable
Like foreign local house home.

Say it ends with them
Telling this story
Differently, and to different people--

How can I tell
What I feel versus
How I remember
You and I in ----?

No, we don't live there anymore.

aaaaaaa(With apologies to Pearl Jam.)


3.
This Story

You have heard me
or heard of me
telling this story or that--

How, for example, I left
science for poetry--
and you admire me.
Passion, you say, how brave!
This is what I want you to say.

But now, listen:
This is me naked in front of you
and I am hideous.
You are looking at me
and you do not want me.

There is honesty here.

I am the woman who forgets
to check the mirror. In fact
there is no mirror.
I forget to look
the way I forget to answer the phone--

The way my fingers shake
because they have something to say
and I have refused to open my mouth
or let go of the pen
or let it move.

There might be nothing
here: White paper like flat glass
without silver backing.


Yun lang po. Bow.