Kimchi Is Not Magical

Kimchi is not magical.
It cannot make you beautiful. It won’t make you ugly, either, though.
It cannot fend off SARS. Lack of tourism fends of SARS.
It will not make hair grow on your chest.
It most definitely cannot cure H5N1 flu (that really scary “bird flu”), and I won’t believe it does till you [...]

Ode To the Competent

The post officers: there are two of them here at the desk.
One mouthing-in letters that never were there in addresses
in foreign script — a quite-understandable gaffe,
until it just cripples her into a useless, blank stare.
There is nothing more to say of that officer here,
because just then the other one rises up, the barrel of
her [...]

Epithalamion
(for Nick and 경주)

Now the strange and blood-heavy lushness of spring
is passing; the air, once thick-pollend, borne off
by some breeze we all feel—and so let us have
done with it, and bear down for the long, hot promise
of summer that is settling into our bodies. This is
the heart of the covenant, as you turn and look into
her face, and [...]

Spring

What in other places they called chinooks
had come and gone so many times that I
had grown wary of believing spring would come.
But then, one evening, a shaven-headed man
in modest, humble roughcloth robes came down,
into my rooms, wordless, fingers joined
together around a secret, a lotus formed
from his palms to bear it, and he smiled at me,
the [...]

More Tiger and Monkey Poems

Bones
In the old days, Tiger’s den was littered with bones;
remnants of long-ago feasts and forgotten mistakes.
Long ago, he’d curl up in the chill of night,
letting the bones dig into his body as he slept.
He’d think to himself, if only some dog or bear
would come and steal away these bones, clean up
this damned den. And [...]

One Spring

Beneath a mutant cherry-blossom tree,
Tiger reclined. Monkey chittered with glee,
scooped up three pawfuls of fallen pink
petals, and sprayed them onto his crown.
He snorted, a little amused, and took a puff,
then showed her a line of foul old fine-drawn teeth.
Hanging from a branch, she blinked and shook
it, and onto them both, the blossoms rained down.
*********

No, [...]

Tiger and Monkey Return

There was a time when Tiger smoked
—not cigarettes, not that sort of thing—
and cast his bleary eyes about him, round
the den of a strange sweet family in India.
That was in the days when Monkey swung
and hung among thickets of foreign pines,
snatching up unattended beer and potato chips
and chittering her way through foreign tongues.
Their feet touched [...]

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