Ana Pugatch is the Poetry Heritage Fellow at George Mason University in Virginia. She is a Harvard graduate who taught English in Zhuhai and Shanghai. While living in China, she also completed the Woodenfish Foundation’s Humanistic Buddhist Monastic Life Program. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in publications such as The Los Angeles Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, Short Edition, and The Bangalore Review, among others.
A MOTHER’S VISIT
Yangshuo, China
She sensed how her daughter
now looked down on her. That
the earth had turned slowly
into night. That her kin would only be
a distant moon. She watched shards
of light slice through
the bamboo thicket, the stars’ edges
hardened and cooled. In daytime
she marveled at the strength
of a water buffalo, how its shoulders
could shift continents. But her daughter
knew this wasn’t enough, because
she’d been there—looking down
from the bamboo raft, and below
the glass surface seeing what flickered
in turbid darkness. Like her mother
she thought of the day when the river
would freeze over, and how
she would give anything
to be something other
than its stillness.
~
STONE FOREST
Memory paints the strokes of each
character as I look for Shilin’s sign:
石林. Mouth of stone, trees side by side.
The bus approaches its karst jaws—
jagged shadow of one last argument,
this mausoleum sealed. Among
the throngs of tapered spikes,
our weak bones calcify. This time,
they do not heal into a lantern sun.
You are my stone forest, I lay you
to rest. I lay you to rest in the stone
forest. Limestone memories at dusk.
This is a good place to leave us behind.
~
GUANYIN
That night I entered a room full of orchids. Dust coated their unstirring faces behind glass. The stems of my arms were reflected back to me, the pallor of light on snow.
In the furthest corner hung a mirror. Along its edges I could make out the stilled hands of Guanyin, the petals of the lotus. Her vase was empty of its water, its relief.
When I exhaled, the halo of arms moved like feathers. Her smile fanned out each concentric row of hands. A thousand arms and eyes for those in need, an eye on every palm—
I reached out to touch the darkened glass. She knew then that I lacked compassion, felt the emanation of my pride. Low, low, rooted like the orchid too firmly to the ground.
Her smile withdrew, her eyes blind and unseeing. The feather-arms rattled like the deafening roar of cicadas. Their tremors shattered the mirror, and the infinite lives between us.