Jennifer Chang

It is not good to think
of everything as a mistake. I asked
for bacon in my sandwich, and then
...

This stream took a shorter course—
a thread of water that makes oasis
out of mud, in pooling,
...

I want a future
making hammocks
out of figs and accidents.
...

Dark matter, are you
sparkless
for lack of knowing
better? The room
...

Something in the field is
working away. Root-noise.
Twig-noise. Plant
...

My house faced an estuary.
I looked for where ocean tide
instructed river flow.
...

No one witnesses
the history of light.
The sky litters itself
...

The thorns had hands. The fire stood still.
It will take a hundred years
to piece together a hundred dreams.
...

I cross the street
and my skin falls off. Who walks
to an abandoned lake? Who
...

At the stables, each stall was labeled with a name.

Biscuit stood aloof — I faced, always, invariably, his clockwork tail.

Crab knew the salt lick too well.

Trapezoid mastered stillness: a midnight mare, she was sternest and tallest, her chest stretched against the edges of her stall.

I was not afraid of Never, the chestnut gelding, so rode his iron haunches as far as Panther Gap.

Never and I lived in Virginia then.

We could neither flee nor be kept.

Seldom did I reach the little mountain without him, the easy crests making valleys of indifferent grasses.

What was that low sound I heard, alone with Never?

A lone horse, a lodestar, a habit of fear.

We think of a horse less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time.

Why I chose Never I'll never know.

I fed him odd lettuce, abundant bitterness.

Who wore the bit and harness, who was the ready steed.

Never took the carrot, words by my own reckoning, an account of creeks and oystercatchers.

Our hoof-house rested at the foot of the mountain, on which rested another house more brazen than statuary.

Let it be known: I first mistook gelding for gilding.

I am the fool that has faith in Never.

Somewhere, a gold door burdened with apology refuses all mint from the yard.
...

I will do everything you tell me, Mother.
I will charm three gold hairs
from the demon's head.
I will choke the mouse that gnaws
an apple tree's roots and keep its skin
for a glove. To the wolf, I will be
pretty and kind and curtsy
his crossing of my path.

The forest, vocal
even in its somber tread, rages.
A slope ends in a pit of foxes
drunk on rotten brambles of berries
and the raccoons ransack
a rabbit's unmasked hole.
What do they find but a winter's heap
of droppings? A stolen nest, the cracked shell

of another creature's child.
I imagine this is the rabbit way
and I will not stray, Mother,
into the forest's thick,
where the trees meet the dark,
though I have known misgivings
of light as a hot hand that flickers
against my neck. The path ends

at a river I must cross. I will wait
for the ferryman
to motion me through. Into the waves
he etches with his oar
a new story: a silent girl runs away,
a silent girl is never safe.
I will take his oar in my hand. I will learn
the boat's rocking and bring myself back

and forth. To be good
is the hurricane of caution.
I will know indecision's rowing,
the water I lap into my lap
as he shakes his withered head.
Behind me is the forest. Before me
the field, a loose run of grass. I stay
in the river, Mother, I study escape.
...

It was inside, gathering heat in her blood, slowly killing her.

No one said a word.

And this grew her fury further, grieved her immeasurably.

What did it look like.

A knot, or a slag of granite.

I imagined another brother, unborn for he was only a knot.

How my granite brother would never leave her.

I grew up in her abject sadness, which soon became our speaking.

And then I left.

Smaller, smaller, he was her favorite.

Jays nag the first light.

And now I am awake before dawn hoping today is a day when I won't have to say anything.

And then I.

To me, it was unintelligible.

I could see through her skin, see my brother not growing inside her.

Would he ever come outside.

The raging jays, the squawking catastrophe.

I wanted to know.

What is the difference between a son and a daughter, I wanted to know.

That is private.

That was her answer.
...

One winter I lived north, alone
and effortless, dreaming myself
into the past. Perhaps, I thought,
words could replenish privacy.
Outside, a red bicycle froze
into form, made the world falser
in its white austerity. So much
happens after harvest: the moon
performing novelty: slaughter,
snow. One hour the same
as the next, I held my hands
or held the snow. I was like sculpture,
forgetting or, perhaps, remembering
everything. Red wings in the snow,
red thoughts ablaze in the war
I was having with myself again.
Everything I hate about the world
I hate about myself, even now
writing as if this were a law
of nature. Say there were deer
fleet in the snow, walking out
the cold, and more gingkoes
bare in the beggar's grove. Say
I was not the only one who saw
or heard the trees, their diffidence
greater than my noise. Perhaps
the future is a tiny flame
I'll nick from a candle. First, I'm burning.
Then, numb. Why must every winter
grow colder, and more sure?
...

She's in the desert
releasing the ashes of her father,
the ashes of her child,
or the ashes of the world. She is not

what she observes. The rare spinystar.
It does not belong to her. Bright needle threading
a cloud through the sky. There's sun enough,
there's afterlife. Her own body, a pillar of ash.
I fall to pieces, she says. Faithless

nimbus, faithless thought. In my life,
I have lost two men. One by death,
inevitable. One

by error: a waste. He wept
from a northern state,
hunger too cold
for human knowledge.

Once I was a woman with nothing to say.

Never did I say ash to ash.
Never has the desert woken me up.
I said
who releases whom?

Inevitably, all have known
what the desert knows. No one
will count the lupine when I'm gone.

No one looks to the sun
for meaning. For meat
I've done so much less.

Cattle in the far basin, sagebrush, sage.

I live in the city where I loved that man.
The ash of him, the self's argument.

Now and then, I think of his weeping,
how my body betrays me:
I am not done with releasing.
...