Topographies

Frontiers, 2009 by Lee, Karen An-Hwei

I. WATER TABLE

Ocean renews the blue wound

the way a mesa or table of light

enters the blind woman's window.

Even the earth flows like water.

One solid body melts another

as one, breaks without warning

the rootless continents. Avalanches

slide to red clay rivers, ice mantles

float on an iron core

of fissured bodies. Sea glass

is the blind woman's table

of iris-colored light. I can't

see the water today, she says,

though blue ardor filters me.

II. DESERT SEA

The blind woman harbors

vision in her body. Light

is hued, wine-colored retinal

healing. Sand dunes say

the moon is a lost eye.

It crosses this nervous

plain in a nomad's water vase

on the nightside of hills

folded in old optic basins,

thin sclera for drowned cities,

sky more furious than naphtha

flowing from vitreous stone.

Petal eye survives a dark mirage

in an underground fern grotto,

fronds unfurling in darkness,

curled sap in an ounce of world.

This is the flesh of irises healing.

Night air quiets the desert sand.

A saguaro says, blooming:

Yes, I am limestone dissolved

in a glass of rain, ageless.

KAREN AN-HWEI LEE is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) ans In Media Res (Sarabande Books, 2004) and winner of lthe Kathyrn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Garber First Book Award. She lives and teaches in southern Californis, where she is a novice harpist.