Winter Zuihitsu

From our apartment’s window: the sky scrubbed sterile. Trees thin with near winter. The rhythmic reminder of what returns.

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Sausages split from their casings on the kitchen counter. Tomatoes with skins as if dresses two sizes too big. Months of enforced solitude making everything lean towards the necessary.

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Didn’t someone say you only borrow this life, you don’t own it?

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Isolated from humans for so long, my only conversations are with rain. Now I know all its names, can recognize the way they nose my erroneous hand.

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Rain depletes the park of people. The air charred with purchased warmth. Returning home, a sale sign sprouts from our apartment building.

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Sudden rupture of crimson leaves: an uneasy reminder that forgetting the blood struck here is criminal.

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Or is this tree a wily migrant who preceded me here?

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When melancholic, it is sometimes easy to mistake desperation for desire.

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Inexplicable joy of collecting tiny containers: the small wooden box made from jarrah, the lacquered papier-mâché shaped like a breast with its tiny green nipple.

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Curious, this thrumming compulsion to move into smaller and smaller rooms.

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Bones of trees rattling beside renovated skeletons, insulated into abundance. A wind grouching of old thirsts.

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And yet of poetry, Mo Fei said: It is the acceptance of a certain form of poverty. It is not endless construction.

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Abrupt agitation at dusk: a sudden virus of sunlight. A contagion I can’t recover from.

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Within these four walls, the feeling of being wrapped in skin.

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Oh, you who see me shift to fit whatever container I’m in: couplet, country, stanza, room. A nomad’s habit, and a woman’s one. But what if the container keeps changing?