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The lightest realizations arrive in restraint—
so the old masters tell us.
Not unlike the tug at the end of a line.
We have language for what is within reach
but not the mutable form behind it.
Or else, why write.
I’m sick of peering at the ego.
No, my ego’s tired of peering at me—
It’s she who awakens me into being.
So it goes: the seer mistaken for the seen.
From Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Xie. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.
after Etel Adnan
And there,
between clean walls
you assume
the position,
angled toward
the red squares
roiling
on her canvases.
Never mind the distances traveled, the companion
she made of herself. The threadbare twenties not
to be underestimated. A wild depression that ripped
from January into April. And still she sprouts an appetite.
Insisting on edges and cores, when there were none.
Relationships annealed through shared ambivalences.
Pages that steadied her. Books that prowled her
until the hard daybreak, and for months after.
Separating new vows from the old, like laundry whites.
Small losses jammed together so as to gather mass.
Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields
and no two brick houses in a row.
I mean, no three—
See, counting’s hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet
over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves.
Hours ago, I crossed a motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat,
the size of a date pit from a distance.
Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?
No matter. The mind resides both inside and out.
It can think itself and think itself into existence.