Poetry
from you are everything you are not
From—
Dialogue XL
a wandering word
*
they love the tree & hate the fruit,
or they love the fruit & hate its tree.
the found noun become a sovereign,
this beginning born into remembering
& forgetting.
*
figures of syllables & parable
pause between words.
*
thanks, man.
*
characters of speech traipse
in cups of wine
& loaves of bread.
*
what you find is not a ghost but a blooded
song.
—now we too have passed thru the place they paused in the book.
*
each has to tell of their own
birth & death.
—an island that once harbored us before we began.
*
482 A.D.
the general tells a story of a temple’s
burning over 1500 years ago. among deaf trees
a boy squinting
one-eyed, the elders all merging in our vanishing.
the lines on a piece of paper.
(until he eyed her by the circus master’s grave.)
until we meet again, yes.
*
still, quiet sky, waves, still,
remembering of water as it
remembers itself.
*
not knowing a small wave in the middle of seeing.
*
i want to learn something from you,
the girl says:
why did you become a monk anyway?
were you just bored?
*
i am not afraid of your death, she says.
you are now written here.
*
when you were dead these were fragments
of bird & word left from the sky,
the boy tells her.
*
small sufi village near where
the mute one lived as a child now
ashore
by byzantine ruins & lycian burial grounds.
pointing his nose out behind a rock face,
the circus man begins to talk.
*
how to live—
all eyes on all things inside messenger fields.
*
and so the story goes on and leaves you.
i see no one or one thing, she says.
*
the slow growth & change of rite & religious dogma—
& shade of a homeless
man squatting under bridge over there
surrounded by motorcycles & rickshaws.
these fires burning in rice &
the end of the question of birth & death,
a language of the unspoken,
black water eddies along shore.
*
that’s manjushri, the girl salutes, hand
over hand over mouth over hand,
an alphabet without desire.
*
that you are living in a question brought the shadow grass,
my diary & all lost in war,
awaiting a flurry of epistles,
in fishing nets cast over shore.
*
Contributor
John HighJOHN HIGH is the author of numerous books. His poems have most recently appeared in Poems by Sunday, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Paramount, and New American Writing; his translations of Osip Mandelstam have appeared in The Nation, Denver Quarterly, Pen America, and Poetry, among others. The poems printed here are from a new collection from Talisman House, you are everything you are not (the third book in a trilogy). He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at LIU, Brooklyn.