For me, the moon extended a branch of heavy plums
and with well-water eyes forgave my ignorance of protocol,
my botched obi, my hair unpinned and ragged.
When winter came to Tsukayama Park,
it seemed to me that the strange-limbed tigers
of his wall-hangings
rumbled like clouds, and I was permitted to watch
the sparrows spiral up to his ashen ear. Under his cratered arms,
I knelt, and whispered tears into the hiragana of my palm-lines,
obscuring the text with salt and snow.
For him, I was always penitent.
I did not question his rule over the cherry trees, the green tide,
the steam of tea in a glazed cup. I allowed him to stifle
my breath in twelve layers of white silk, to paint me a new mouth,
to fold back my hair in beryl combs
that cut my scalp with piscine teeth. For him, I pressed out my pride,
flat as a river, and bowed my face to the floor.
When summer came to Tsukayama Park
it seemed to me that his voice was the thrust-cry of cicadas,
that the wind beat drums of star-hide, that I had
learnt the angle of the closed mouth
well enough to pass for one of his own.
But in the midst of my prostrations, my rain-hymns,
the steeping of my braids in inkwells,
I heard a woman laugh at me.
She said that the word was
Tsukayama—top of the hill—nothing more.
And for me, the moon was excised from the sky.
I had no grace left but my face flattened into sun-cracked dirt,
no patron but the feet of a false moon,