Dear Millennium, A Vision in the Xeriscape

Outdoors in my sun-blasted xeriscape, a sapling
shivers with memories of green rain, greenery
of jade dishes, of scallion chins afloat in a bowl
of seaweed miso-broth, of uranium milk glass
flashing in black light, of fruiting olives finning
silver, fanned sage-leaf over bleached feathergrass
where bees enflesh their bold, brassy honeycombs –
in this margin of humid compost under a fig tree
whose blossoming is stark – a fig tree is one fig,
a shining corpus of butter oil, a solo lamp glows
over sun-tolerant, unbudded apple ice crossing,
moistening hot salt-river stones. Honey floats
on a wick of waxed liquid, veiled old sweetness
ornamenting this haze. Why should a drought
unfold as a mere dispossession of plenty? Light
pools a newness of fields not yet green-green,
scorched, stern as an ancient, dry-eyed prophet
shepherding desert exiles in the Old Testament
waiting for a staff to blossom or go ophidian,
armed neither with stone nor staff to cast first,
nor any sign of deliverance
                          into a promised land, not yet.

 
Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored two novels, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017) and The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis 2019). Lee’s translations of Li Qingzhao’s writing, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao, is the first volume in English to collect Li’s work in both genres (Singing Bone 2018). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Currently, she serves in the administration at Wheaton College.

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Creation Story