so I don’t know about the two alive sides. The split selves not seeing eye-to-eye, I know only too well.

•

You knew and I know differently from parents who realized alloy only from without, whereas the coywolf, say,

realizes coyote and wolf even if the composite isn’t brought to light—

maybe light is the opposite of stone, say, lightning that cracks inside a cloud? or coral that glows below the surface of the sea?

or the full moon that illuminates the shoji of the falling-asleep boy? I love the firefly’s serenading signals, patterned according to kind. Kind—

something our parents did not essentially heed.

In my mind, stone, water, light, etcetera all come down to dust on a moth’s wing that’s evolved

to keep her patterns cued for a mate and to keep her blanketed in the stunning night.

In my mind, an alloy is ultimately practical because, as you commented, to be hybrid anticipates the future.

You also admitted: if you only have clay on hand, then from clay even the centipede is cast.

•••

charms v.

Empathy

If you see a dragonfly caught

In a spider’s barbed-wire

Endeavor to offer asylum

For compassion to fly ever higher

•••

Divine

Song Yang wanted to work the recalcitrant farm,

to pick ginseng with her grandmother;

catch iridescent butterflies by the iridescent river. Five years later,

street-name Sisi, she worked in a realm

of under-the-table massage parlors,

a stone’s throw from where I teach Intro. to Literature

to one hundred undergraduates,

Color — Caste — Denomination — / These — are Time’s Affair —

•

Picking up Heineken, Red Bull and rotisserie chicken

from a bodega on Kissena, Sisi could realize

Death’s large — Democratic fingers

But can I realize the line, merely having pored over Dickinson

where the Hudson River overwhelmed its banks—?

•

Sisi, forced to blow a dirty cop, gun held to her head,

thought of ginseng fields, the chit-chatting river, the factory dormitory

with her butterfly collection pinned to the curtain, while I

lectured to luminous undergraduates on

Death’s diviner Classifying

•

—lectured that oblivion within a chrysalis

embodies the democratic; suggested

that there the Tenets are

put away and put behind;

recited lines to my immigrant students, my homeless students, my

working-graveyard-shift students who likely get

the more obvious instar

doing whatever they do outside our elegiac quadrangle. Certainly—

•

whether Astoria, Corona, Ozone Park—

my students living three generations under one roof

know better than I that only Death can

Rub away the Brand —

•

and yes, these students already know poetry, yes,

they recite Meng Haoran,

say, in the lexicon intimated in utero.

Chrysalis of Blonde — or Umber — / Equal Butterfly —

I murmur to a bleeding-heart.

•

Sisi’s rivals deemed her dogged until

fleeing an undercover cop, she stepped to her sooty balcony,

over a mop and rail, to drop into neon air

back to Song Yang, to the line

As in sleep — all Hue forgotten —

then died in the careless ambulance.

•