Jason Wee (b. 1979)

SELECTED POEMS

Epilogue

Time enough to regret my hands
wishing to know the rot beneath the bark 
or the land parcel sale, or the existence of birds,

taking every care to make nothing but pictures of these
I wish I knew how two people
empty themselves of rock and sand,

how to arrive at a time other than how one feared
the way the albizia folds the night in
or the fledgling an unhomely neck of wood

if it knew better, knowing nothing is
After all, isn't it a kindness when knowing better 
anticipates the rejection to come,

when we push the body, repulsive before, from thought
to focus on the hips, the mouth, feeding us?
I write of a coast, the changing of it,

every year these goshawks make me an immigrant
without pass or power in their high places
I write down differently but by instinct I crouch when pained

These fall off my fingers into the dark:
negatives, a watch set ten minutes ahead, 
the little given, I kept from dying

The Foolish Knows

Or do we ignore 
the little we risk, 
the possibility of

denial being art, 
the impossibility 
of sleep without fear

of the morning,
forget wisdom, do we know 
what art is, the two-seater

that, pulled out, forms his bed, 
blue except for 
a brown aurora

left from a 4a.m.
incontinence, his hair 
freshly wet, falling

as pipings of black gesso 
as he tells me this, 
or the L-dopa

taken at maximal dose 
to release the ropes 
that, waking, he finds

himself bound in, 
that I remember from 
Oliver Sacks testing on

those indigent and asleep, 
or maybe dreams, 
the unconscious promising

another world, that's it, 
or it is in the risk 
of seeing, when Sacks

describes Parkinson 
as an astronomer, 
London his space,

the bodies in untrammelled 
motion, constellations, 
comets, am I

now describing a star 
when I cannot tell 
which is Sirius,

where the Crux is,
I am lost, I can show you 
ignorance, am showing

while I write some 
directions to an end where 
I might find some answers.

by Jason Wee
from An Epic of Durable Departures (2018)

 

SELECTED POEMS: “Before it unmoored…” >