offerings
BY MARCO YAN
Adamant incessant the snow and I refuse to calm tonight
specks flit splinter like the living who seek each other
then disengage not conquest but gentle repetitions
falling apart back to the ground as one requires no sounds
no different from my father reaching out to the dead
spreading paper tributes for his father in the shape of blooms
gilded squares in orange frames faux notes tossed to the underworld
bright chrysanthemum curled blunt spears seared
whatever they want he said and stoked the flame in the barrel
cinder surging I knew I was born with this fright in me
this fascination with the settlement of everything holds me down
and when I trudge down the ever-deepening path holes open
wide mouths waiting to be filled but what can I give
down there even the embers are cold white inviting
bold stare
BY MARCO YAN
j
for Catherine Barnett
Never mind Mars or whatever is bright on the fringe
of our solar system,
they are too far—gas, ice and rocks that matter
only to our desire to know the unknowable.
They might be bigger than a child’s imagination
or small enough to be fixed,
linear on a canvas, maculate, let dry, scraped flat.
That impulse in Cézanne
to watch objects settle on a tablecloth unscathed.
There’s an end to a still-life—
when the green apples go red,
when the knife and the milk pot
float away, or seem to.
The moment you see that, you know they’ll move, again, somewhere.
