Rim of a Red Moon

Not quite full, moon sinks through hills hazed
From brush fires east and west of us.

By the time this is done, I think,
I’ll be gone. I’ll write for the birds.

Birds will have to live in my stead.
Well, words now. They’re birds in my head.

Oh, this is too much, wrote Xi Chuan
In a long, long poem that went on

And on on such things as bird words
In poems still left whose hosts are ghosts.

To write is to give birth or bud
A child that’s not your own, a child

That made you first, a child that knows
It can’t eat or grow but could last,

Child not made from you but your past.
I write fast. Xi did too, I think,

But he had more ghosts to run from,
And more eyes on him in the streets

The day he woke up to grey rain
And thought of Meng’s birds in “Spring Dawn,”

And of how long Meng had been gone,
Birds too, now, while the words stayed song.