Friend
The moon follows the earth’s orbit for millions of millennia
Unlike the sun that whitens the sky, he is silent
A curtain of space unchangeably dark behind him.
His flight is alone despite the stars decorating his path.
When you write his name like a ladder,
A small hook at the end of one leg,
Does it anchor him to earth or sky?
A charged brush skims over surfaces: paper wraps rock.
Two ladders side-by-side writes friendship in black ink.
Want
To want is like wood
The eye and the heart below
Between here and the horizon
Stands a forest, statuesque, green
The eye captures the forest
It lies on the wet surface
In flawless detail. Each branch
A thought a breath a black line
Burnt against the sky
Outlines memory as simply
As motion stilled. Few
Pathways trek through the heart
The sky like grass only blue
Sky
From the outreaching fingertips
Of your right hand
Unfurls the east and from
The fingertips of the left the west
Between them a tender chain
Of rock woods rivers of red and blue
Green earth divides your legs
A compass that measures and strides,
Landscapes of clouds rest
On your brow and whatever walls
Were built are reduced
To that single horizontal line
Your arms reconstruct in bones and flesh
These poems are reimaginings or translations, perhaps, of three Chinese characters for the words friend (朋 peng2), want (想 xiang3), and sky (天 tian1).
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Jaime Robles is a writer and visual artist. She has two collections published by Shearsman Books (UK), Anime Animus Anima (2010) and Hoard (2013). She has produced many artist books, including Loup d’Oulipo, Letters from Overseas and Aube/Afternoon. Her bookworks are at the University of California, Berkeley, Yale University, and the Oulipo Archive in Paris, among others.