Fukushima Winter

The same pervasive fearfulness

a wave draws, or begins to draw, when it draws

itself, though it fails. I’ll call it Self-Portrait

of a Murmur. Self-Portrait

with Broken Nose and Black Eye. Landscape

Inside an Icy Flame. And the boy I was,

perishable, holding in his hand the dark

we had traveled by bus to the maple farms upstate to see.

My reflection warps across these sculpted rocks, as it did

on the darkening buckets of apples in the winter light.

The light, the sea, lashed the toppled shore rocks green

cold and volcanic indigo across the jetty. The same

murky iridescence glassing the marina, blackening

the bay. I’m looking for my shape,

my effigy. Dark-skinned, orphaned,

alone in Fukushima Daiichi failed reactor number 4,

curiously barefoot, down from the mountain

prefecture. Look at me, in these sickle-lipped waters,

a boy with an apple in his fist. Octopus,

the color of night-pomegranate? Literal

heart, with its gray, dangling valves? We want

to love. We don’t know how. Each wave

a gaping mouth, or slurred urn.

And if I carried the apple home

I got sick. And my mother stood over,

blinking, like a vigilant bird. And my father,

while I slept, lay his hand across my fever, leaning

fearfully, awkwardly down

to speak some final word. My omen. A name.