Quick rice was white rice
A picture of an old man on the box rewarding impatience
Virtue almost a kind of fortified nutrient
It only takes five minutes to prepare
On the tv screen I can picture rice paddies
Reflecting the sky back to itself as women bend over
And put their hands through the sky
Hats hide their heads in modesty or in shame
Why do I hear helicopters when I close my eyes
And the long stalks bending around in circles
As if in sympathy with the blades or the stars
Or watching an invisible animal bedding down for night
I turned off the tv and had children of my own
I had to learn to cook so I could feed them
Then I learned some grains cooked slow
Jasmine for example or Arborio thick and squat
Ladle after ladle of steaming broth dropped into the pot
And stirring it in circles that keep spinning
Spinning until the liquid’s gone
Add more and then I repeat I repeat
The same motions differently
Salt the water and bring to boil
Drop in the wild or the brown or drop in
The forbidden and turn the heat down
It takes an hour
I can play games or I can do chores
Wipe prints off windows
Turn solicitors from the door
The radio plays songs between news of the war
Just parts of songs nothing whole
Fading out before the words come on
When the drone decides the data looks right
Is firm to the tooth is tender but has bite
It sends the bomb home
Silent as delight a button turns off the noise
The children eat so they’ll grow
*
Dark purple at the bottom of the empty
White bowl we ate all we could eat
Of forbidden rice with avocado and meat
Like ink at the bottom of the bowl
I could write their names on a grain
It might bring them luck
Glued onto a string tied around their wrists
It might bring my children luck
To write on rice with ink made from rice
To dip the single-hair brush into the bowl
And paint their names patiently
As ink dries so they walk through time
Carrying no burden greater than a grain of rice
No wise man in a cloud looks down
The water’s been boiling so long no steam
Curls up into a cloud
No cloud gathers while at the table I work
No voice speaks from white
Cloud of sleep-tossed hair
The child wears her open mouth and stares
Out the window at her hands at the tree
That says maybe when the wind blows through
Its cloud of leaves maybe this work will
Wander back to earth somehow somehow in the dirt
Make a bed where a cloud can fill a head and hide
What’s been done from what’s been said
*
The longest grain can only hold a single word
Just a name just a hint like joy
Like pain hints at some fact outside myself
Like rice in a plastic bag
Like a cloud squat and dumb in the light
On the table wanting while it waits
All the words like like
The book of genesis is waiting again to begin
To begin I need to break the moment apart
And on a grain write the word begin
Not long after the beginning an old man sits in flames
They curl up around him like petals
They seem so gentle when they seem like a flower
That is an image of fire on fire
Like words singing inside flames don’t burn
Like rice in the scathing heat softens damage into use
So that old man sitting in a flower on fire speaks
And a younger old man writes down all he says
I am jealous I am kind I kill I condemn
I save I choose all of you numerous as dust
As stars as grains of rice
Quiet in a box or in a plastic bag don’t wait begin
It makes the fine motor skills ache appropriately
It feels like starch in the mouth worship
No images love others print it down on these grains
Watch the pot until it boils be patient amen