By Weijia Pan

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In Liszt, I hear an old man stumbling across the fields to meet me.
He starves to save bits of bread for my pocket.
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My own grandpa is different in a senior home in Shanghai:
He’s polite. Asking about my age & name & marriage & age.
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Time’s time’s timestamp. Which means that time keeps its own records
like a metronome, or a fountain blooming every 25 seconds
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unlike the skyline that fades when the clouds loom large,
a flock of your imagination dropping on a book’s dead pages.
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In the early 19th century, Japanese samurais from the South
would gather every spring to discuss insurrection. Now! they would say,
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finally; it was 1868, the Americans were banging on the door
& the last shōgun, a bony young man, would wisely concede.
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Being an introvert, I concede every day to my own messiness.
I read in my study. I love the fact that you’re out there, reader.
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But glad you were not here is not what a poet should tell another poet, as if
to imagine the world, we should only write about selfhood, the feathers of birds
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on parchment, & cold, 13th-century nights. How destructive
were Stalin’s pencils, marked in blue ✘s & ✔s on death warrants,
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a color not visible when photographed?
He started off as a poet. A job I now have.
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I remember another poet in Flushing, NY who told me
that I shouldn’t let my poems end too easily, how I’d always
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despised him a little, yet accepted when he rummaged for cash
& broken English, a fatherly way to say stay alive and goodbye.

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