Birch Skin

Once you wear a birch skin,
foxes can’t possess you.
You’ll see through their guises.

Cold July, a girl is peeling
the bark from a white birch
like a brittle tape.

Our climate is full of them.
We offer the fox god
rice in bean-curd purses.

The girl holds her thin bark
against the paling sun
in the overcast sky.

Don’t scratch your scab. Foxes
are drawn to the smokey smell
of your healing wound.

Mother’s voice, rising mist,
and my hand undressing
the birch against all harm.

My child, my course of scars.
You’ll always fear being owned
by something other than

yourself. My unblessed.

                

 

What I Wish

Mr. Sato slips into conversation with me
the way a petal drops from a cherry tree.
Mt. Yoshino has a fat waist girdled with three thousand cherry trees
     according to him.
Am I just in feeling flattered?
It’s a rare feeling even in spring,
and his fingers are moving like translucent white baits.
I like repeating his name Sato,
drunk on its unoriginal resonance;
I even like his watercolor face
on the verge of merging with the rest of the scenery.

Mr. Sato shows me how to prepare arrowroot jelly.
There are more Satos than all the blossoms put together
     at Mt. Yoshino each spring,
but he is the Sato who makes arrowroot jelly.
I am not learning, not really—
I am busy thinking
I won’t see New York again, even in a dream,
and how much sweeter my disposition will be once I become
      Mrs. Sato,
how much more civil, my world. For the final touch now,
Mr. Sato’s hand lets float salted petals on top of his jelly
in a manner nondescript, yet slightly feminine.