The warble of melting snow is the river

is the bleat of the sandhill crane
is the hush of the autonomous mind        of the flame above the canyon
is the cow drinking water from mud          is the cow and the word cow
is the deckled face in the overhang of stone
is the bone weathered into wood
is the wood weathered to stone
is the sentence
is the moment that longs to be the sentence hidden in a sentence
is the legislated road         is the grass is the grass
is the nerve that runs from socket to wrist
is the common knowledge of aperture and speed
is the hole to be yawned into         its origin         the stone that says
the impulse of water         is the moss against
is the growing in spite of

Copyright © 2023 by Emily Lee Luan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I’ve been interested in the conflation of the self and nature in classical Chinese poetry and the absence of pronouns in those poems, especially the first-person ‘I,’ that allows for a space of continuity between image and subject. I wrote this poem while in Wyoming, where the expanse of land can feel obliterating, blurring the line between where the body ends and the landscape begins. The line ‘is the moment that longs to be the sentence hidden in a sentence’ is adapted from a line by Song Lin in his collection The Gleaner Song, translated by Dong Li.”
—Emily Lee Luan