Between seasons

I have walked so long through the undulating pitch

that the four tones shatter like a bowl on marble,

a kite string snapping, a road that forgets its end.

In California, I collect thick, green fog from the woods,

card it between my knuckles like raw wool, and spin it

into coals that color the unslept nights. In another life,

Beijing’s ginkgo trees would still rain down a thousand

suns of hammered gold, and I’d still listen to the straw

broom’s whispers, gathering them into an ambered quiet.

I miss a winter with mass, with density, where the coal-

smoke slung low like a wet wool blanket, a shared and

sooty breath. Here, the seasons are monosyllabic, ironed flat

by an insistent sun, pressed into one lemony afternoon

that never quite ends and never quite has a beginning.

Two cities, two countries, I am the hyphen in a long

sentence, my body fading between horizons, pupils blinded

where I keep the taste of a different sky. I am

the buffer, the space between the lines, stitched together

by suitcases, my tongue a tenant on a month-by-month

lease. Here, California stays bright, stays relentlessly

kind, the light is a scalpel, too clean and precise. And so

the sentence continues, without a period in sight, its spines

tired and broken, my shadow turning into a nervous bird.

It won’t escape this curse. It won’t settle on the ground.