3 Poems: Inara Cedrins (USA)

You Linger
.

The teacher of silk painting
helped us choose brushes in Liulichang:
of the purple fur of rabbit coats in spring,
weasel hair, translucent
sheep’s wool, clear at the ends.
We stroked the tapering fullness, and I told her
how you used to tell your secrets to the chickens,
caressing them, because you knew they wouldn’t tell —
she laughed. And said there were brushes of feathers
too. At that time I still hoped to carry
your child in my belly,
tightly, like the sac of a grape.

.

I remember the way you pulsed inside me
and wake pressing to me the pillow filled with millet,
its spilled seeds sticking to my flesh. I tolerate
the way my body misses you, is reduced
like stock, a consomme becoming richer
from bones picked clean. Ah, distance.

The miles between us
are best left uncounted, wound close before unraveling
as the cocoon of a silkworm is held coiled
in secret.

Heavy Metal Joy
.

Meeting you for lunch, I am so full of happiness
that I feel I am studded, wearing spurs,
I clink when I walk. I want to love you in the way
cilantro curls around the bone in the soup,
red pepper dissolves to pink —
to spend my force

in a desire to be direct, as in Mongolia:
a chunk of mutton and a dirk,
the billiard table on the plateau, and nothingness
all around.
.
.

Disparate Trajectories
.

I consider legends of the constellations, lovers
that revolve around each other perpetually
unsatisfied. That brief time we shared a room
you’d smile in your sleep, turning your face
toward me. You were disarming.
Our connection was tenuous and fragile
as the bonsai bought in China,
crushed into my camera bag, carried
through Mongolia and Taiwan,
smuggled past Customs into the country.
Across a black sky soft and smooth as old cloth
.

…………tonight the stars cling like lint. The red sign
…………of the Merit gas station across the street flicks on and off
…………pulsing red light through my windows that touches mementos
…………as though they were smoothed rocks rising
…………up through water with barely a ripple, a bracelet
…………of wooden prayer beads, tiny teacup with crackled glaze.
…………Etched in fine ink lines
….……..the Seven Immortals dance in a circle
….……..around the small gourd set on its pedestal
…………on my coffee table, as though whirling about
.

the capsule of air preserved
at hollow core. In Hong Kong
the chef slung coils of dough for whistle noodles
through the air above his head, thumped them down
on the table in the instant our eyes met. Creased map marked in blue,
.

…………Yu-chia sleeps on my couch
…………like the open half of an abalone shell,
…………arms curved, relinquishing. Her dreams twine through my rooms,
…………faint, bearing a pearly sheen, figures in a trajectory of contentment,
…………not a hurtling so fast that stone

disintegrates. In the museum at Zhangzhou
artifacts preserved in display cases, a sliver of bone, ancient
section of a city wall of earth —
through streets thickly overarched by French sycamores
we came out into brilliance. What
can I keep of you
.

…………to kindle into light?
…………The bonsai unfolds its delicate leaves,
…………resilient. She leaves me as a gift
…………a bag of dried mushrooms, whose aroma
…………and rich taste in broth, as of dark meat, game,
…………permeate deep as forest shadows overlapped
…………on black soil where the dissolving fallen leaves
…………merge their fine vertebrae.

.

Inara Cedrins is an American artist, writer and translator from Latvian to English. In 1998 she went to Beijing to learn to paint in Chinese ink on silk, and remained for five years to teach writing and lecture on art at universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University, as well as to the People’s Liberation Army and students at the Central Academy of Fine Art. In 2003 she went on to Nepal to study the technique of thangka painting. After the king’s coup d’etat in 2005, she relocated to Riga, Latvia, started a literary agency called The Baltic Edge, and taught Creative Writing at the University of Latvia. Cedrins returned to the U.S. in 2006 and live in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area.  A collection of poetry titled Fugitive Connections was published in 2006 by the Virtual Artists Collective. Her first anthology of contemporary Latvian poetry was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1981, and she is working on a new Baltic anthology. Her poetru and translations have been widely published in literary journals in the USA and internationally.

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