The first part, 再, meaning again. Again, threading a line
through the eye. Images frozen in the lens, another morning’s
silence caught in water. Wrinkles in a sheet of glass, the sun
reeling in its catch, asking which mouth was lifted off the hook’s
glint? How many times a reflection was mistaken as the hands
of god? Taking something up and up. Old hands trimming a day
into something smaller: stones countable along the shore, holding
water’s shape against the current. My grandfather’s hands
casting the line out into the blue. Going on and on.
The last part, 见, meaning to see. Everything real made by the act
of seeing, by how far its own light has parted. To say today, you are only as real
as you ever were. To say light can touch you once
and then never again. In plain film, backlit and gray, its space called
as time, into its smallest remainder. When all along, this time was no time
at all. When the next year arrives, holding out its hand
without knowing where you are. My grandfather picking up
last year’s leaves in his yard, footsteps lettering circles
in the ground. The last century waiting beneath the split lines
of stars, standing still for everything that has passed through
in darkness. And learning for the first time, where its body ends
and where the world begins. Cupping a flame before the start
of next epoch. The last ice age unfinished, carving the land into lakes.
This lake where my grandfather waits with his fishing line, the days
bountiful and quick now, his little red cooler no heavier at the end
than when it began. Callused fingers stacking a pile of rocks
by the shore, marking a place he’ll never return to. In a different age,
a monument meaning North. Meaning a warning. Or safety. Or nothing
at all. Something to be vanished, just as anything else,
along with the next footsteps or high water.
