Yumiko Hirokawa
The Word
Poetry and Painting
Belonging Melanie Figg
If there is a map to get here, it’s buried
under layers of paint and skitter, a bouquet
of wary and doubt. A girlhood of scars married
to skin. All my life I’ve been bracing for someday:
gear up, set out, gaze locked on the horizon, lost
in the rush of promise above the trees. A silver ring
holds worlds of warm turquoise, woozy and star-crossed.
I’ve been watching the signs. I’ve tried everything
else. There’s a dumb moment when you spot birds
of prey and it’s some kind of magical sign. I rehearse
the story of our romance through internet passwords—
an indigo oasis in the metal grin of commerce.
A talisman to cleave to, a forecast to ignore.
Fires are messaging from the opposite shore.
The Secret of Bells Melanie Figg
In motion always, eternity is indistinguishable from creation, and there the link between ecstasy and ethics shines—
O that boy—unmoored & called to make bells unthinking & readying
breaking open the earth (—to end so much anxious waiting / to extend his reach)
collapsing into that cool silver, murmuring—
I am here
exhausted in relief & surprised
how lonely that cry is—that slow unraveling, that dying into newness & leaving the husk to bear the worthiness of arrival—to reflect what in front of you is sacred & the birds, hectic & caught up rushing—spinning across air & into our vision of sky
NOTE: in homage to Andrei Tarkovski / epigraph from Donald Revell]
胡蝶之夢 荘子
昔者荘周夢為胡蝶。栩栩然胡蝶也。
自喩適志与。不知周也。俄然覚、則蘧蘧然周也。
不知、周之夢為胡蝶与、胡蝶之夢為周与。
周与胡蝶、則必有分矣。此之謂物化。