Letter to Ba From Ancestral Tomb in Jiangxi Province

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Just as I have confessed to you time after time,

I am not grieving for granite & soil.

Three characters, no epitaph. A century

of mothers & fathers slung across your shoulders &

I am not grieving, because given enough time,

are not all ghosts wished into darkness?

Should their spirits not scatter, set out for dawn?

I can ask you to tell me about strength,

have you nose through the scrapbooks & archives

to wring stories out of scribbles. Right now,

though, it is not enough for me to pull the weeds &

bow again & again at the ground. I have done all I can—

found myself in the mirror, imagined our faces

repeating themselves like a question. For so long

I have trudged & stumbled, dragging my feet

after you. In Jiangxi, the moss grows

from one year into the next—I imagine

it stammers, failing to find warmth from stone,

the shapes of which eventually fall into vanishing point.