The Emperor of Tsukayama Park

When first the word was spoken, I heard:
Tsuki-yama -- Lord Moon.
And for me, the moon settled onto a dais, with
sixteen-pointed chrysanthemums in his phosphor-hands,
topknot oiled with seaweed and orange,
his hakama fringed in silver worms
which wove on and on,
flooding the nightingale-floor with silk.

The folds of his sleeves creased blue and black
in signet-shadows, descending like stairs to me,
in a poor, threadbare yukata,
my sallow Western skin protruding,
forehead pressed to his white tatami.
                 For me, the moon extended a branch of heavy plums
and with well-water eyes forgave my ignorance of protocol,
my botched obi, my hair unpinned and ragged.

When winter came to Tsukayama Park,
it seemed to me that the strange-limbed tigers
of his wall-hangings
rumbled like clouds, and I was permitted to watch
the sparrows spiral up to his ashen ear. Under his cratered arms,
I knelt, and whispered tears into the hiragana of my palm-lines,
obscuring the text with salt and snow.

                 For him, I was always penitent.
I did not question his rule over the cherry trees, the green tide,
the steam of tea in a glazed cup. I allowed him to stifle
my breath in twelve layers of white silk, to paint me a new mouth,
to fold back my hair in beryl combs
that cut my scalp with piscine teeth. For him, I pressed out my pride,
flat as a river, and bowed my face to the floor.

When summer came to Tsukayama Park
                 it seemed to me that his voice was the thrust-cry of cicadas,
that the wind beat drums of star-hide, that I had
learnt the angle of the closed mouth
well enough to pass for one of his own.

But in the midst of my prostrations, my rain-hymns,
the steeping of my braids in inkwells,
I heard a woman laugh at me.
She said that the word was
Tsukayama -- top of the hill -- nothing more.
                 And for me, the moon was excised from the sky.

I had no grace left but my face flattened into sun-cracked dirt,
no patron but the feet of a false moon,
evaporated into plain grass and a stone stair.

My kimono dissolved to water,
and the sparrows turned in shame
from my nakedness.