By Peter O’Donovan

—after Jadeite Cabbage with Insects,
National Palace Museum, Taipei

Stumbling from the Qing exhibit
beauty-drunk on shape and glazes,
those flowing cerulean blues,
I heard a massing up the stairs,
a faint concentration calling
this pack of grannies rushing past,
with little charges almost electric,
an upward flood flowing to a plain
of people, pressing tour groups
enveloping some thing scarcely
visible, some dim verdant smudge.

I waded in, past the stragglers,
the dawdlers, the bored-slow slackers,
past the PRC operatives
skillfully disguised as sightseers
or weeping children, past the pious,
the museum completionists,
past them all, to the front, the fore:
a bok choy cabbage, barely there,
about the size of disappointment.

Mostly stem, a pale translucence
etched with veins, gentle threads curving
up discolored jade, blotchy, cracked
but weaving its flaws into form,
into ruffled leaves of sea-green,
broad blades glistening in half-light
with two grasshoppers in hiding,
revealing themselves by angles,
the slant of a leg not quite part
of that smooth verdure, that soft sway
of the foliage folding down
beneath the insects’ careful weight.

And then, I sensed it. A movement
in the stems. The faintest flicker
in the leaves, and beneath, the eye
of the locust beginning to glide
with all the swiftness of stone, taking in
this crowded, quickened place,
this tempest-blur of a time,
this maelstrom age,
this brief, sudden day.

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Peter O’Donovan is a scientist and writer living in Seattle. Originally from the Canadian prairies, O’Donovan received his doctorate from the University of Toronto, studying design aesthetics. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Atlanta Review, Orange Blossom Review, River Heron Review, Qwerty, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and elsewhere.