First attempt at a five-year plan
For Mika
Memory digests without codes,
where thickness of meaning is
a proximity to time. I’ll start with the sky,
the color of teal, or the shade of coffee in tea,
to root desire in the world. The sentence
attempts to follow the one before itself: it
being a purposeful rhythm that should be evident
but signs alter as the mind does. I did not expect
to be here. I say ocean when I am on this shore,
yet it is the sea who carries interior time. The eyes
have not given up eating words, wishing hope
in every heart wearing its identity number
and progress chart. Thickness of meaning is
also the shore in between and at the edge.
There is a reality in the five years I will live, the one
who is also me who is already there and has been there,
knows that letters to love remain the same.
I was attempting a five-year plan after a conversation with a teacher I respect a great deal.
One of the difficulties in planning for the future is the habit of seeing “future” as a place. Where is this physical future I am writing towards? Here or there? The “here” alters as the “there” does. Here and there also translate into home and homelessness, the temporary and the illusion of the permanent. And there is the larger question: how do plan for a future if you believe you do not live just for yourself and by yourself? If you do not believe in ambitions for the self? Or you think you don’t.
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of My rice tastes like the lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press). My rice tastes like the lake was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Book of the Year Award for 2012. Tsering has received a Cultural Equity Grant from the Arts Commission of San Francisco, and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook. Tsering grew up in the Tibetan exile communities of Nepal and India. She recently moved to Santa Cruz where she is pursuing a PhD degree in Literature at UCSC.