1
Tea leaves wilted in sunlight are shaken and bruised so that the edges redden and veins turn transparent. A man at a counter eats boiled silkworms and coughs; a woman stops speaking and stares at the constellation Perseus. Once, a merchant smashed a black raku bowl when it failed to please a teamaster, but, glued back together, the black shards had the texture of mulberry leaves. You pass someone bowing talking on the telephone, and the shock is an incandescent quark leaving a spiraling track in the mind: you sense how, in a field guide, it is impossible to know the growth arc of a mushroom, but stumble upon shelves of oysters growing out of dead aspens and see how nothing in this world is yet yours.
2
True or false: termites release methane and add to the greenhouse effect; the skin of a blowfish is lethal; crosses along roads in Mexico mark vehicular deaths; the earth is flat; oysters at full moon contain hepatitis; no one has ever seen a neutrino; butterflies dream; the fins of a blowfish are always edible; oolong means black dragon, but oo means crow and long means dragon; he loved the curves of her body; the sun revolves around the earth; caffeine stimulates the central nervous system; light is a wave; the mind is composed of brightest bright and darkest dark; context is crucial; pfennigs, xu, qindarka, centimes, stotinki, qursh are coins; the raw liver of a tiger blowfish caught at winter solstice is a delicacy; I have a knife inscribed with the names of forty-eight fish.
3
You sift curtains of red light shimmering in the November sky, sift the mind of a roofer mopping hot tar. Walking down a hallway, you stop and sift the brains in a glass bowl, sift the tag dangling from the wrist of a corpse, sift the folded wings of a sparrow. You feel the prevailing notions of the season are green-stained lactarius prevailing in the mountains for three days and an hour. You have to reject ideas of disjunction and collage, reject advice, praise. Then you might look at a Song dynasty map of Hangzhou and see the configuration of ion channels in the brain. You might look at an aboriginal sandpainting and see a cosmology of grief. You might look at the swaying motion of a branch and feel what it is to be a burned and shriveled leaf clinging to death.
4
I stare into a black bowl and smell whisked green tea, see a flap of tails and orange koi surging in a stream. Sunlight is dropping down through tallest pines; I stop on a bridge, and water passes underneath and through me. As a potter has a premonition of death when he avoids using a red glaze on a square dish, we come to know the form and pressure of an emotion when it's gone: a soliloquy of despair ends as a rope burn in the hands, and pleasure flares into a gold chrysanthemum. Is the spinning spinless when nothing is yours? The mind slows to a green-flecked swirl; I touch contours of the black shards. Before sunrise, a man is cutting all the morning glories blooming in the garden and places one in a jar in a tearoom.
5
They smuggled his corpse into the city in a pile of rotting abalone; "Very famous": they all nodded; he knew the daphne was a forbidden flower; "Twerp," a restaurant inspector muttered and placed a C in the window; they slurped noodles and read comic books; he spits off the subway platform; the slightest noise so disturbed him he had a soundproof room built: white walls, white floor; she kept feeling a snail on her neck; for tea ceremony, he cut three gentians and threw them into an Acoma pot; she buried the placenta in the cornfield; a hunter discovers a honey mushroom larger than a blue whale; what opens and closes, closes and opens? she took his breath away; he dips his brush and writes the character "flower" incorporating the character "mind"; a flayed elephant skin; she stir-fries tea leaves in a wok.
6
Red poppies are blooming along a wall; I look at green and underlying blue paint peeling off a bench: you rummage in a shed and find a spindle, notice the oil of hands has accumulated on the shaft. In the rippling shadows, the shimmer of water. I see yellow iris in a vase on the kitchen table and smell lightning; commuters at the World Trade Center may descend escalators to subways: it is always 5:05; Su-wei brought him five thousand yellow pills and said if he swallowed twelve each day it would restore his hair, but is this a form of sipping sake steeped in a jar full of vipers? You see footprints under water in a rice paddy and on the water's surface, clouds; Altair and Vega spin in longing: the sun dips below the horizon in a watery gold.
7
The mycelium of a honey mushroom glows in the dark. What does a yellow Man On Horseback know of winter and spring? A farmer pushes his fist into clay and forms a bowl. You have the feeling the world will continue as long as two aborigines clack boomerangs and chant? A woman has the watery shine of a sapphire and becomes yellow lightning. She has a dream that resembles a geode: if we could open it we might recover the hue of the first world. The light through a pressed octopus cup has a rippling texture resembling a cool undulating shadow over skin. In the dark, you feel the precession and nutation of an emotion is a star: Sirius, Arcturus, Capella, Procyon, Aldebaran: shadows of mosquitoes are moving along a rice paper screen.
