Dream this, if you have nothing better:

A father, his daughter on his shoulders as he runs up a mountainside.

Oh—we’ve forgotten the bullets

It is cloudy 1938 and the mountain is mo gan shan, and the Japanese soldiers

are in the town below.

They’re like rain now, the bullets, coming down

in madness over the wilderness of the mountain, and they plant themselves,

like imaginary seeds

into a heart too young for sorrow to start

in.

Now dream this:

A mother dies and there comes a new mother,

and the daughter from before wears rags and is mistaken for a servant

as she carries her stepbrother on her shoulders

into town.

Overgrown flowers in a chest too small to host them,

spilling over from chest to eyes.

Then this:

The daughter marries a man and now she is not the daughter

of the dream but really the mother, eyes sunken from sleeping

on a universe too finite. Look out and the room

ends too close: soap rations and rice rations and black market pork.

In the night sky there are spots of white spit that leave the man’s mouth with his falsehoods.

And this: a third daughter.

Three daughters—

or maybe only two. Only two since the first one falls,

too many bullets

rain down on a soul too weary

since skin loses to thinning:

almost rags—

Since heart grows too heavy to carry so many flowers,

So they slip to liver and then root there,

grow thorns,

and blossom into something bigger and sadder.

Since

nothing being black and white collapses, eventually

to piano keys, to one thing she taught me,

to one ode,

all of it unexpectedly wild,

All of it unexpectedly dark,

like a green-lit sleeping city she never really saw.

Last night I sealed up a kiss to a worn-out aphorism

and cried over spilled milk;

cried over spilled wildflowers,

and cried over one last dream of one last ode.