Kimono Exhibit at the Museum of Civilization
All the ways I have loved you:
i. Shunyo: Cherry blossom
beckoning at the waterside,
opening day of spring.
ii. Kyoko: Spellbound anticipation.
iii. Gea: Illusion.
iv. Ohn: Consummation, shrouds of
mist.
v. Kou: Change.
Mount Fiji meditating on gold.
Cold and tender dawn.
vi. Hiwacha:
The uncertain hour --
turning over between fall and
winter
vii.
Ai: Obliteration.
viii. Sei: Blue trace of hope
in sudden snow.
Simple Instructions
Welcome
home. When we meet
tonight,
please have eaten.
Let’s not
waste time on salad,
cheese or
the spaces between words.
I’ll have
patience only to watch you eat
olives,
brush tongues to know what the tart earth tastes like.
Wash. Prepare
the body as for a night
out spent
in. Put the passport with
its middle name
mystery in a drawer, remember
who you are when
not away.
Wayfarer, is there some place you have not
been?
Hafiz says
there is a great expanse of territory
where all
rivers flow into the forested valley of your forever
longing, lit
by fairy lights. Lay down irony now, take me to your bed.
Set your
fears at the door as shoes on the stairs of a mosque.
Have some
faith they will be there when you return.
Short Treatise on the Nature of
Drafts (Version 8)
You intended
to go to Paris, or the Costa del Sol: tickets, check; passport, check. At 1 in
the morning it seems all the varied and fascinating details of your life will
culminate in this one trip. But waking – late, befuddled – you find that
despite your best efforts with a compass and a map, here you are in the middle of
goddamned downtown Milwaukee. You can’t figure a way out. You may be lost for
days, or the trip may be abandoned.
You’re
Michelangelo working in Fimo clay.
You meant to
work harder on it, or longer, or wake up earlier, or just toss it off between
the dentist’s visit and your own self-care, but not having had the time you’re
happy still to claim it as yours because who could blame you for that crucial
missing bit in the middle, that part right at the pivotal turn which now
careens in disorder but one day soon will be a silver Porsche 911 licking the
Italian coastline.
Never let
the draft drive.
Your draft
is a toddler with a lisp and a club foot and will be just fine, thank you, if
only you can manage to let it grow into itself. Don’t rush – a precocious draft
is anathema; the trick is to grow up with all virtues intact.
You must
approach a draft with trepidation, the tentative toes of a young ballerina in
her first pointe shoes – the shiny pale pink of all the tender things untried.
Have you noticed how a woman’s nipples darken after she’s had her first child?
True also of drafts. Meaning every sexy thing takes its own sweet time.
If you would
love a draft, take a nap with it and stroke its temple tenderly while it sinks
into its happy place. Don’t offer
directions, the draft must find this place on its own.
Like
everything else you’ve ever loved, the draft expects your attention even in the
moments you are half-asleep, even when you’d rather be doing something –
anything – else, even when you’re trying to forget it, even when you would lie
and say you have forgotten it, it was just a fling, you barely remember its
name.
The draft
loves your lying self the way a footballer loves the ref.
And they shall know a draft by its
myriad complications.
The draft has a maze only the
gardener can love.
Don’t say
you should have known better.
Admit defeat
only if useful, only if it will feed the hungry draft.
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Rhonda Douglas is the author of Some Days I Think I Know Things: The Cassandra Poems (Signature
Editions, 2008 www.signature-editions.com)
and the forthcoming short fiction collection Welcome to the Circus (Freehand
Books, 2015 www.freehand-books.com).
She is currently finishing her second poetry collection “For” and a selection
of those poems were featured in The New Quarterly’s Spring 2013 issue (www.tnq.ca/magazine/126-all-sea.)
You can find her on Twitter: @shallicompare.
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