SPRING/SUMMER 2026

Cao Xueqin and Other Poems

Geoffrey Nutter

Cao Xueqin

For a long time, I was writing down my dreams

in a little book with a marbled cover. 

Someone had made this book for me—by hand—

Someone I would one day come to hate. Why?

The book, it turned out, didn’t keep good dreams. 

They were, I suspect, someone else’s dreams. 

I’ve been told this is what they call a “first world problem.” 

But then on one day I stood on a glacier

from which one could hear ice crack like miraculous bells 

Oh, I don’t know. I don’t hate anybody. 

But I imagine she gave birth to seven dragon children

each more innocent and destructive than the last. 

I’m trying hard to remember just one of those dreams. 

This hatred is making me feel like a dog. 

Or at best something quasi-human.

Ginger Rogers

I wish you weren’t sad because of the things

I have to tell you. Perhaps you can come to love them, 

or at least partly. And if your virtue is tender

that is fine, and if it is non-existent, that’s fine too. 

We can unlock the door for a little pleasure—the Door 

of Pleasure—then unlock it again for more pleasure. 

In the Very Large Array of Summer Things, all never

needing to be named or illuminated, there are things 

that exist more so than others, some dreaming

in the raw fact of sleep beneath the cliff’s shadow,

others reading from the golden-leaved chapbook

titled Little Bird’s Erotica—still others 

periodically more than conquers, some beautiful 

invasive species, one with purple leaves

of black volts of electricity.

Chiyo-Ni

Will you braid my hair for me?

Just for five minutes? Then,

when we find we like it, 

you can go on braiding for a year?

Or forever, or whichever comes first?

Or we can climb the steep stairway

to the drum tower, where night seems longer.

But it’s okay—you don’t have to feel something

all the time, or even for a moment. 

The velocity of light is unreachable

for anything but light; 

but so is the part of you I love, 

like a leopard, a leopard of fire

with imaginings beyond observation 

but with a heart whose wildness it allows you to tame.

Burt Robertson

When we were children we were horrible:

stupid and thoughtless and needlessly cruel.

We stood, just raw, dumb recruits, dumb and raw

as parsnips, or turnips before the golden chair 

of the Evaluator. Koi, red and black like tigers

circled the cool reeds in the water-garden pools. 

Somewhere, there is a vase or some other kind of vessel, 

burning in a kiln until a moment deemed true. 

Why? What’s it for? Well, they might set it out when it’s finished 

in a public place to warn monsters

that fire can be used to make things beautiful. 

Then it might glow with a sky-blue flocculence

for untold years like a distant star. 

Its light has taken millions of years to reach us. 

So I guess our light has taken as long to reach them.