A Taste -

January 31, 2006




I am dipped
in pink
like an apple
in caramel
when the rouged sky
of morning
drops
a coat
of rose
over the view
I,
soft with radiance,
taste -


Like a petticoat,
the rose of the sky drops,
coating me
in pink -

Jane:

Each day before Tai Chi we sweep.
The mulberry tree loses its leaves slowly in autumn.

Even during the rainy season its leaves still fall.

Then sweeping is slow.

The wet leaves resist the broom and cling to the ground.

We don’t try to clear all the leaves away, then.

In spring, everything is topped in blossom.

We sweep in summer mostly to remember sweeping.

My Translation:  

            I woke this late January day, a chemo day, to the healing power of pink light.  I felt bathed in grace, supported and matched in the rosiness of the sky.  I had been suffering, wanting things to be different than they were, caught up in confusion over another’s wants and desires, and my own.  I let it go, cleansed by the light of your broom.  

             My surgical scar is a gauge.  It flames in pain, when I seethe in anger or perceived self-righteousness.  Harry Potter and I each have a system to warn of danger.  His dangers comes from outside.  Mine from within.  I manage my thoughts now, understanding  that judgment is division, and does not serve me now. 

            Later, though, when I returned to this day, I felt my hurt and pain, pain buried deeply in fiber of muscle, and marrow of bone.  You pointed out  how vulnerable I was, then, like a baby, taking everything in whole, at a visceral, cellular level.  We spoke of watering grief with tears and, allowing time, to heal.  

            You pronounce this the heart of the book.   Perhaps, we are relieved to feel our grief.   The heart is tenderized when we pierce our pain. 

            I am grateful to now have felt the pain, and, perhaps, now to stand on the “proud flesh” of healed wounds. 

            The Mulberry tree comes from China.  You sweep its leaves in Oakland.  East and West merge as one.  Sunrise.  Sunset.   Pink Sweep.   

Jane’s Translation:    Pink Sky Sweeping

Remembering this day from four months later, it feels that some of what this day is about is what isn't said.I am sweeping under your pink sky. Our poems are light and airy. They don’t speak to  what each of us was living through at that time...me beginning to embark on a new and more demanding job, My son making some difficult decisions for himself, you at the moment before another chemo therapy and dealing with Jeff and Jan telling her parents about their decision to marry. How many cultural doubts and wrenching came when that door was opened. Still your words feel somehow both magical and true. Although the pain isn't central to either of our poems, your words, especially, don’t feel like denial. They feel like they open up a bigger circle of transcendence around your pain.

I’m reminded of my notebook from South Carolina. It documents in 25 poems the eight long years my son’s father and I struggled as young people just starting out, growing our own food out of necessity, feeling our bond dissolving not because we’d lost our love but because we’d lost our way.  Most people who read those 25 poems never know  the pain and struggle that was the ground they grew  from. Rather than being about the sadness of that time, each poem instead represented a brief moment that I had found to write. Each for me is like a momento pressed in wax or shell saved inside a clear jar. They were the moments when the demands of survival lifted briefly. They were the moments when we made some brightness for ourselves to relieve the ache, like these words of ours on this day.