By Jenny Xie
Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields
and no two brick houses in a row.
I mean, no three—
See, counting’s hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet
over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves.
Hours ago, I crossed a motorbike with a hog strapped to its seat,
the size of a date pit from a distance.
Can this solitude be rootless, unhooked from the ground?
No matter. The mind resides both inside and out.
It can think itself and think itself into existence.
I sponge off the eyes, no worse for wear.
My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns.
At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive.
Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.
Jenny Xie, "Rootless" from Eye Level. Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Xie. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
Poet Bio
More By This Poet
Origin Story
I was profligate like a floodlight to the sun.
Hoarded saccharine and toothmarks,
wanted only the thickest rhymes, two of each.
Full I was of promises I never intended to keep:
puckered laughter, lines to feast.
I let everyone who entered my life enter through...
Abstract with Red Square
And there,
between clean walls
you assume
the position,
angled toward
the red squares
roiling
on her canvases.
Into the oils
of a new tense
she herself
days before
had dissolved.
There, impasto:
her mountain.
Trimmed down
to the first
seeing.
Tamalpais
at every pitch,
pistachio
patches scraping
against cobalt.
Edges opaque
until they refused.
Mountainous,
she, too—
which is to say
surfacing,
color latching
to the seasons
where meaning
rushes.
Of this...