Michael Longley

A Grain of Rice (1995)

Wrap my poem around your chopsticks to keep them clean.
I hardly know you. I do not want you to die. Our names
Fit on to a grain of rice like Hokusai’s two sparrows,
Or else, like the praying mantis and the yellow butterfly,
We are a crowd in the garden where nothing grows but stones.
I do not understand the characters: sunlight through leaves,
An ivy pattern like fingers caressing a bowl, your face
In splinters where a carp kisses the moon, the waterfall
Up which its fins will spiral out of sight and into the sky.
Wrap my poem around your chopsticks to keep them clean.
Does it mean I shall not have taken one kiss for ever?
Your unimaginable breasts become the silk-worm’s shrine.

‘A Grain of Rice’ appeared in The Ghost Orchid, is © Michael Longley, and appears here with the kind permission of Michael Longley. For a note about Michael Longley see A Gift of Boxes.