Northwest Passage

I am seeking the northwest passage

to a China of your love –

whether some aesthete’s dream China

of antiquity (all skills, blue-green

paddies and fireworks) or some ideologue’s

newfangled China (all pajama’d equality,

barefoot medicine, and wall posters)

I neither know

nor care,

being stuck here in this distant northern ice,

moving from thawpool to thawpool.

I see many Chinas,

a new one every day

flowing like light from the firmament;

the dayfloods are full of them; they are

crystalline in the night static.

Each day the sun spills

its miracles of promises

and its fleeting clouds;

the light glances off the rainbow-crazed

white-toppling ice, and the night

wraps the ship with its forebodings and

blueblack sounds. I am Henry Hudson,

lost in the quest, clear though the starsigns be.

Do I know what I’m after?

I see what lies before me

so colorful in its whitenesses

indulging me with inklings

of my rowboat fate.

If I am Henry Hudson, I could

gladly be set adrift in that small boat

here in the bay. I long for your

most orient self but this black water

is you too,

and I could die in it.

By Paula Bonnell

From: United States

Website: https://www.paulabonnell.net/

Twitter: paulabonnell1