Wherever a person stands in the garden of Ryoanji, there is always a stone that cannot be seen. It is like the sliver of absence found on the face of a man who has glimpsed in himself a thing until then unknown. Inside the silence, just before he begins to weep. Not because of the thing he has learned—monstrous or saintly, it was always within him—but for the amplitude he hadn’t believed was there.

TO OPINION

Many capacities have been thought to define the human—

yet finches and wasps use tools; speech comes

into this world in many forms.

Perhaps it is you, Opinion.

Though I cannot know for certain,

I doubt the singing dolphins have opinions.

This thought, of course, is you.

A mosquito’s estimation of her meal, however subtle,

is not an opinion. That’s my opinion, too.

To think about you is to step into

your arms? a thicket? pitfall?

When you come rising strongly in me, I feel myself grow separate

and more lonely.

Even when others share you, this is so.

Darwin said no fact or description that fails to support an argument can serve.

Mye wrote: Bright, bright, bright, bright, the moon.

Last night there were whole minutes when you released me.

Ocean ocean ocean was the sound the sand

made of the moonlit waves

breaking on it.

I felt no argument with any part of my life.

Not even with you, Opinion, who drifted in salt waters with the bullwhip kelp and phosphorescent plankton,

nibbling my legs and rib cage to remind me where Others end and I begin.

Good joke, I agreed with you, companion Opinion.

THE WOODPECKER KEEPS RETURNING

The woodpecker keeps returning

to drill the house wall.

Put a pie plate over one place, he chooses another.

There is nothing good to eat there:

he has found in the house

a resonant billboard to post his intentions,

his voluble strength as provider.

But where is the female he drums for? Where?

I ask this, who am myself the ruined siding,

the handsome red-capped bird, the missing mate.

“IT IS NIGHT. IT IS VERY DARK.”

Rainfall past any interrogation.

Questions and answers are not the business of rain.

Yet I step forward by them—

Left foot? Yes. Right foot? Yes.

And all the time wanting to be soaked through,

as the flowers of the apricot that open too early,

in mid-December,

are soaked all the way through their slow petals but do not fall.

The colors only slightly deepen.

The fruit has far to travel.

Left foot by right foot under the hidden stars.

And I?

Unfolded question by question,

like an elephant trained to paint what is in her heart.

BONSAI

One morning beginning to notice

which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, which return it.

How quietly the abandoned body keens,

like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves.

Rain or objects call the forgotten back.