Spring Cleaning In The Winter Heat Snap

Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowpaste Mirrorcream (translated by Don Mee Choi) has been sitting on on a chair in my room since December, daring me to read it again, convinced that it had something different to tell me this time.  After all, if it didn't have anything to say, wouldn't it have found its way back to the bookshelf?

So I'm rereading it, and barely got three poems in when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to write, and then five words in, it said "Surprise fucker, here's another poem entirely, write until it's finished!

So, here it is. Fresh. Unedited. I'm going to back in and see if this book is trying to tell me anything else.

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What's Right, What's Left

I am sweeping the crumbs of you off my bed
I am sweeping the empty like a birthday party magician
I am sweeping the piles of skin to the floor
Fertilizing the carpet
which will grow dozens of versions of you every spring
None of them quite as you
but all of them the same fragile

I am claiming the center of the bed
                          neutral territory
         sweeping the empty of me into the stitch ridges

I am not taking sides in the shadowing of blame

I am mining the dresser for the last silt of you
See how we are not entirely the bed
though that's where it always starts

I am opening the window to diffuse the smell of you
I am opening the window to remember there is always outside
I am opening the window to call in birds
to pick your skin out of the carpet
but the birds are afraid of my inside

I am emptying the refrigerator of all the food you like
even if I bought it for myself
I don't ever again want to taste a thing that brought you joy

I am overreacting

I am regretting the lemon meringue in the trash
I am thirsty for the apple juice
I think you only drank apple juice because I bought it anyway
Why am I letting you vinegar my apple juice?

I am checking the drawers for what's missing
I don't remember precisely what was mine and what was yours
I don't remember precisely which us I am trying to forget
I don't know if that means I am successful in the forgetting
There is a beanstalk in my bedroom
There is a beanstalk that can not possibly have grown from your skin cells
There is a beanstalk that some errant bird must have planted
while I was busy in the kitchen

There can not possibly be a beanstalk in my bedroom
because this is an apartment
                            in a city
                            in the twenty-first century
and I am lactose intolerant and devoid of cows and magic

I go to sleep

I wake up to bats and am not dreaming
I wake up to bats circling a beanstalk and am not dreaming
I am covering my head under bankets
no bats no bats no bats
no beanstalk
bats no beanstalk
no batstalk
​no stalking bats

There is a cyclone of bats in my doorway
The only escape is up the beanstalk

Why should I escape?
Why should I follow some mystery out of my home?
Why shouldn't I just live on this bed until morning
                                              until the bats retreat out the window
                                              until this bed is mine
​                                                        I say mine again

Morning sneaks in through the window while I am
                                   searching for the thinning veil of bats
Morning sneaks in through the window like he is you
Morning sneaks in through the window and I pretend I haven't been waiting for him
Morning sneaks in through the window but halts at the beanstalk
Morning hates fairy tails
Morning likes literal
Morning likes just say what you want
Morning rolls its clouds at the very idea of beanstalks
Morning shoos the last bat to the attic of a neighbor's house
Morning sees me eyeing him
                 shrugs 
                 boulders next to me on the bed
                                  No more reason to sneak
Morning knows it is caught
Morning doesn't care
Morning knows we are both different every time we see each other
Morning doesn't care
Morning withers the beanstalk to husked leaves that fertilize the carpet
Morning doesn't know what to call you either
but its being there sometimes is enough