rambutan sutra

late evening kitchen: lime green cutting board,
black handled paring knife: this fruit atavistic,
hirsute, blood-red, a creature scooped up
from a tide pool one drizzly autumn after-
noon, an entire marriage ago—

late December rain descends in silk
threads in a heartsick Chinese lüshi—
within the fruit’s slit husk, this milky
egg encasing an indigestible
pit in fragile pulpy white sweetness—

no one would put anything together like this:
bonds of wedlock, translation without pronouns,
prickly shell, this opaque incongruent core—
today: reading Du Fu’s lament—rain & white birds—
tonight: these rambutans you & you gave me


Jack Hayes
© 2016


For the uninitiated, you can read about the strange & delectable rambutan here.

A lüshi is an 8-line Chinese poetic form.