After A Long Enough Time
Twitches In Her Sleep
Pink Matisse
Baba Calls Me On A Wednesday
Four Drawings Of Flowers

After A Long Enough Time

After Hölderlin

Only today I heard
like a voice kicking inside a cup
the breezes say
however in disbelief
poets are free as swallows
             left me truly speechless in the sun

The dream had been squeezed out
while at the supermarket
next to the young pears
bonds of light wrapped
around a flagpole
spoiled
twice now by the curious rain

next

Sealed my family with the mark of the rabbit

Makes an eddy on the tongue
that name of yours

As when nanoseconds peeled themselves off
the clock-face
to reveal the past which was beautiful
not yet ripe
rich as fathers
white as the space behind

Twitches In Her Sleep

The subtext of that salty breeze lifting
the raw hem of a sundress
buys you passage
into thought

Don’t try to guess what it all means, the day
and its tragic willows
were turning pink, were bending

But imperceptibly you had been walking out of trees
into a ragged dune

She loans you her long telescoping lens
for finding the secretive mating pairs

Something blue but not tepid about her
She is speaking and you bring your ear
closer, you listen well, that is something you give her

She says she doesn’t believe we’re all going
up in smoke
And you disagree but you pause

My dear, my corpus is too ashamed to come
down for dinner
It’s just, I’m feeling brutally
human tonight

Spectral, ancient

Everywhere I turn someone is rolling up their American sleeves
and the boots go down
(with a sucking sound) into the mud

Up past the waist and ornate breastplate
those devastating words still clatter
around in me: bare shoulders are for women in paintings

I asked her, hold my hand as you once did
This word too, shall pass

Pink Matisse

A ring or halo of pinkish nudes
may otherwise devastate

depiction, grammar-light
Other unreal geographies of the human soul

She was initially all the rage
then inevitably she spoke

I’m always misplacing the emphasis! She thinks
She thinks to speak again

Bar codes, languages from the outer-regions pulsating
Astronomical calculations arrest

the fate of mankind’s past
But do let Georgina know I’ll take the peach brocade

Here we are, somehow find ourselves
at the precipice of a poet’s word for bargain

The day is just starting to turn over
in its sketchy telekinetic coat

and I’m as dim and witless as the next buddha
Powerful as his stony bowl

Baba Calls Me On A Wednesday

Blottings of leaves against sky, on your back playing with soil

Flowers are anchors
             Sky cuts through trees

Laid down in the grass for a year or more

Light now, its quality dancing in a pupil
Stitching through leaf and dark
A story with wings at the start, a linear idea
White airplane belly pointed west

One country taught me to listen
One daughter listening

One leaf made to listen in wind, trembles against the past

The endangered green of honeydew
Clean air and sweet
One daughter memorizing numbers

Home like a rope, ties
Shaking how leaves listen
Little shock of dandruff shook loose

A puff of white on baba’s head
One country taught me the words, falling flower

Four Drawings Of Flowers

Four drawings of flowers
with their heads cut off
Willful as flowers
appearing now as women
only to carry out from the frame
a skein of silk cloth
To clear a cutting surface
To polish the marble inlay of his sword’s grip
So many brocade squares in the pockets
of women
awaiting their day
You can hear now the folds
of her taffeta dragging against itself
Scrape of a needle through eyelet
There she goes again
Flowers at task

*

Four drawings of people in a Chinese funerary style
Arranged themselves by depth of feeling
Arranged again by country of residence
Arranged by the artist at the family’s request

*

Four drawings of insects
The belly of this one is liquid pearl
overlaid hectic green
Crawling beneath my mother’s foot
early in the morning
as she pedals the sewing machine before work
where she’ll sew something different
for an American woman going on holiday to a country whose name
is not worth remembering
Likewise the beetle’s name is its disguise
Its head shape pleasing to the eye

Wendy Xu was born in 1987 in Shandong, China. She is most recently the
author of The Past (Wesleyan, 2021) and Phrasis, named one of the 10 Best
Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. Her work has
appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, Tin House, Conjunctions,
The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is
assistant professor of writing at The New School, where she teaches poetry.