“A Pine Moon Empties a Late-Night Window”
—Meng Haoran (691-740), ”Year’s End, On Returning to Southern Mountains”
Entangled in a tall Douglas fir,
a late-night moon sucks all the light
out of the room, through the window,
up a path of glowing silver,
and reflects it back into the sun
to fuel daylight that floods fields and hills elsewhere tonight.
Aquarium
A summer evening, thunder, the crawfish tries
to climb the glass sides of the tank in vain;
enclosed, slipping, he can utter no cries,
sees no lightning, does not know rain.
We climb the slick walls of each other's minds
uttering no cries the other can hear,
our logic hard as glass, untouched by winds
or nameless flickering thunderous fears.
Each of us a self-enclosed storm
raging in a medium unable to
sustain the other's life, enclose its form,
twined as the crawfish and thunder, we two.
Yet should he escape the crawfish will die,
and we if we parted lose more than our lives.
Editor's Note:
"Aquarium" first appeared in Marriage: A History (Finishing Line Press 2026)
Bruce Parker is the author of the chapbooks Marriage: A History (Finishing Line Press 2026) Ramadan in Summer, (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and Tears for Things (Plan B Press, 2024). He holds an MA in Secondary Education from the University of New Mexico. His work appears in Triggerfish Critical Review, Blue Unicorn, Cerasus, (UK), Prairie Schooner. Connecticut River Review (which nominated his poems for a Pushcart Award), and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Grand Little Things 