Three children skipping
over rocks, their bamboo slippers
smack the gray gatherings of fine grains,
their small lips parting wide for Mandarin shouts,
pink zigs and pinker zags beneath inquisitive sensing,
and upside-down bowls shatter, flying straight black hair into the wind

Today the curved roofs above hold themselves upright as
cicadas flit, trembling in their song

Three children skipping
rocks with their left hands, their slick shoes clutched in their rights
For if it were the other way around, there would be no challenge
Standing right where the sand’s getting wet with salt, and hollow
shells turn glazed and whole, luscious, like the
lobster she gets for dinner and they’re wiping from her plate,
like the lacquer she wears on her nails trickling from the brush, the
sweat down their foreheads to their eyelashes
Glazed and whole, the bottoms of their sandals,
shaved smooth from so many adventures through and around
waterfalls, and under veiny leaves

Two young adults studying
calligraphy in separate quarters some years later, she
at the cool marble terrace table
A lantern supplants the sunlight-turned-moonlight, her
ink pen scratching the rough parchment, as he,
in his creaking bed in the basement, scratches
his brother’s name into his palm with his fingernail,
dirt-caked as it is, leaving fleeting indents by the blue veins
protruding from his wrists, until she rings for water

Two young adults studying
each other in the moonlight from opposite ends
of a square marble table, a glass emptied over a lantern at its center
Actually look at each other for the first time
in some years, for she had asked him to stay
Instead of his unfamiliar, deepened voice obliging her with
“hao, xie xie,” he stared at her
stoically, again her equal
The ball between the teeth of a stone lion rolls
easily, but is too large—impossible—to remove
She glimpsed past his standing figure a koi, its mouth
surfacing from the pond below, just inside the water’s frame,
those grey gatherings which polished their old sandals
It blabbers hungrily, glimmering white in a green-black hell
It pulls her away first, pushes her onto the lantern’s handle, and up,
and over the fence, against the terrace heavily, watching the candle
smack the fish’s head, dead dead
dead and smooth in the water

Tonight the curved roofs above hold themselves upright
as cicadas flit, trembling in their song