between the river and the trees
by Joanna Sit
They told me you died in May, the season of peonies
that bloomed in every well –
tended cemetery – their heads too petal heavy
for their stems to bear, sinking into spring mud
The blank space that I entered into – Brooklyn, Queens
came as a bland surprise. I would not believe that was all
there was and kept waiting day by day. As I waited too
for the water to rise and the trees to drown
I waited for the sudden rain that hovered all summer to come
and the sea to rush the river when it did. Perhaps the apocalypse
had already come and gone, and the pain of loss had been let go
without my knowing – surely without yours. Even. Perhaps. After all, these years
seeped away, spent beyond everything we could afford. The account
long closed.
I would not tell or count
the deficit I held out to you
until the weight broke me
the pieces I spent more years
putting back the total cost of unscrolling
and rescrolling until your image blurred
then not even a ghost in that landscape
a blinking sparkle on the river
a browning blemish on the white
leaf of the raintree, under which I am
standing now, looking across to Ridgewood,
where you died.
And I still think you are on every ferry
speeding by, and I still turn my head
and look up at where you might still see me
even as I can’t see you
because in this life, one of us lived
fuller than the other and for that
one of us will never fully die.
Joanna Sit was born in China and grew up in New York City, where she lives with her family. She studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer at Brooklyn College and now teaches Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. She is the author of My Last Century (2012), In Thailand with the Apostles (2014), and most recently, Track Works. Her poem "Timescape: The Age of Oz" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2016. She is working on an ethnographic narrative called The Reincarnation of Red and another book of poems called Fantastic Voyage.
