The Japanese Garden

Jean Valentine (2007)

The Japanese garden
is tilting quietly uphill—

eleven wet green stones,
bamboo, and ferns—

It might be under water,
the birds be fish, colored in. And you,

masked reader: the glance
of your underwater lamp,

your blackwater embrace—
not bought or sold.

On a Passenger Ferry

Jean Valentine (2007)

(For Grace Paley)

The deck is big, and crowded. In one corner,
an old woman, sick, on chemo, not in pain, is
writing in an elementary-school notebook.
Nobody else saw her, but I saw her.
I had seen her before. Her round, kind face,
smiling and still as a photograph
outside a window—