It's you, the one the night calls friend,

You, the girl with faceless dreams.

Perch yourself beside the moon

And you will see the girl I see.

Who can wake you as a rose

Nodding kindly with the wind?

The trees will find their fingertips

Before you bare your breast to them.

My fingers beat upon the table

Against the grains of time and space.

I watch you dancing in the minefields

And pray one day you'll find this place.

The Jiyu

    I wished my old tree good morning as I rustled my way through its branches and set my back down on the slope that its trunk had been building. The sunlight had just begun to lift the dewdrops, slowly making room for the songleaves around them to transform the new morning breeze into the music of the spirits.

   You cannot hear the first note of a jiyu's song. There is no grand entrance or catchy hook. It's more like a choir of thousands of distant voices all entering and exiting at different times with their pre-ordained notes. When you start to hear the song, you realize that it's been singing for a while, only your mind was not clear enough to focus on it. No mind has been or will ever be clear enough to know which of a jiyu's leaves sang first. Only the tree can know, and it will forever keep it secret.

Gutta Cavat Lapidem

That night, I went through my usual walk through the gas-lit tunnel that ferried me across the river between two lives. There was water dripping from the ceiling onto the mortared stone floor and it reminded me of a stone engraving from the barrows of our ancestors. "Dripping water hollows the stone". And as I walked alone in that desolate place, transfixed to the plip of the seeping groundwater, I pondered which of my lives was becoming the stone and which the water.