Table of Contents
Foreword Sesshu Foster xi
Water Chasing Water
Coming Are the Days… 3
Village Boy 4
As If 5
Coastal Highway 101, 1960 7
Uncle Harry 9
Flight 10
What We Remember Best of You, Hank 11
A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command 12
Retreat 13
Bronze Statue in Rain 14
Bamboo Blossoms, Bamboo Seeds 15
Meditation Upon a River 16
Two Persimmons Side by Side 18
I Would Like to Be… 19
Lychee 21
In My Little Room 22
Another Room Poem 24
Tonight I Hear the Sloshing of the Freeway 25
Evening Encroaches 26
A Moment Passes By 28
A Season in Hell 30
Please Sir, Tell Me Who I Am 31
The High Walls I Cannot Scale 32
The Burden of Sanity 33
(Untitled) 35
Mostly… 37
Poem for S.H.J. 38
Eventually I Will Know 40
Refueling 41
Like Water Chasing Water 43
Conveyor Belt 44
In Your Free Heart, the Bird Builds a Nest… 45
Chinese Waiters 46
Let the Chinese Mafia Sleep Tonight 47
My Father in the Restaurant Kitchen 48
The Kind of Father He Was 49
The Phantom of the Opera 51
Around Us 52
Sweet and Deep Lanterns Burn into the Night 53
Yet Ungrasped Feminine Shapes 54
Selections From The Truth in Rented Rooms
7th Avenue South (1985-1992)
The Question I Want To Ask 61
The Memory of Hands 62
Windows After a Rain 66
Raw and Easy 67
Cold Stones 69
Goldfish 71
Against the Pre-dawn Light 72
Apple Moment 74
At the Bus Stop 75
An Old Hotel Dweller 76
You Naughty Woman Smiling Coyly at Me 77
At the Tokyo Airport 78
Psychoanalysis of a Room 79
In Water Buffalo Time 80
Egg Tarts 86
How to Cook Rice 87
Far and Near 88
A Moment in My Rented Room 89
Aberdeen, 1966, or, Driving Around For a Poem 90
Hank Keeps Coming Back to Aberdeen 91
The Inadvertent Persuasion of a Rented Room, or, the Evolution of Context… 92
A Slow Ox-Cart Hauls the Sage 94
"Fortune Telling…" 95
The Woman in the Next Room 98
It's All I've Got, He Said… 99
The Spy's Reliability… 100
The Morrison (1993-1996)
I Have Augmented My Premise of Isolation and Sorrow: The World Comes Into the Pallor of My Room… 105
There is a World I am… 106
In My Room… 107
A Moment Ago I Meant to Toll You… 109
The Love this Abode Contains… 110
In the Slowness of Days… 111
International Terrace (1996-1998)
At #1105; December 3, 1996 117
Untitled 118
I've Heard the Chan Bells of the Monastery… 119
Focus on the River… 120
Missingness… 121
Untitled 122
You Will Relax Into this Poem as You'd be Pleased to Expect Nothing 124
In the Onslaught of the Inadvertent a Machinery… 126
#1105, Now a Year Later 127
As the Night is Beginning to Focus… 128
I Want You to Write Secretly… 129
Relish in the Mundane 130
Sometimes When I Leave Behind the Places I've Been… 131
If There Was a Choice… 132
Forum 133
"What is The Truth in Rented Rooms'?" Asks a Reader 135
Afterword Russell Leong
