Tessellations

My father, looking over the soccer-field
at the semicircle of Korean drums,
in dusk, in Shanghai, is thinking about
old and new minds. The way winter
thinks about summer. The way people want other people,
with boughs of juniper. Stags of ice.
The way everything collapses eventually one pale morning,
almost untroubled by the weight.
We look at each other,
baffled, silent.

But you didn’t know,
like those deer we found meandering
the night streets: not only time is ephemeral,
striding and leaping out of sight.

Last night, waking in the middle,
obsessed with object constancy,
I looked through the pantry for salt to eat,
spinning on in our human wishes:
to be correct but also sympathetic,
to admit that there is pain, and there is pain,
but at least the bafflement
is sometimes followed by the droning
world, turning into another morning.