Plaster of Delight

I delivered bottles of milk in the dawn

in Kyushu, before a longbow drawn

in paradise pierced the paper

that waited in the courtyard there.

Like quiet calligraphy

​

The coruscation extended— the snake

in a game of Snake.

The shadows grew longer and the moss on the trees

more significant in the boreal years

to follow. The target crumbled,

​

The shredded paper of our delight,

the living columns by beams of light

beaded off me then in the heat,

forgotten in pachinko machines

and Tokyo tracksuit alleys and bowling alleys

​

and too much vodka, too many cigars;

the inky press of people and cars.

I worried about the city and marveled,

dreaded flying home and ditched my

blonde American girlfriend.

​

A mercy in neon roamed,

I knew not what lay waiting home:

the bad years, lonely castings about

for more lofty moss in the sunlight,

for the clinking of bottles in the dawn,

​

for the music to sound the way it sounded then,

for the cool kids, our matching tracksuits again,

the tension of the string, the target waiting,

the older kids tales of geishas,

the pride preceding a decade.

​

​

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