only an instant:
the time that it takes for their faces
to fall apart

()

oh, the distance
that echoes superimpose
on the chiseling sound that is history

()

blossoming cherry trees open
their one idea to the
calligraphy of crisis

()

the temple bell—
dividing, then restoring
the vanished mass of meditation

()

no here in this haiku—
just the conjunction of sand
and silvering cloud

()

day-long departure:
the green pines of March
extended into sleep

()

writing has left within you
the delinquent memory
of what was written

()

land, property, topography:
it makes no difference
beneath the birds

()

without ritual,
time ages
like two hundred years north of a century

()

amidst the fields,
the horse sketched a summary
of the seventeenth sutra

()

how, in search of form,
emptiness tracks
its own early return

Note: “Disorientations” collages together—and so “disorients”—two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson’s Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, a yellowface simulation of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) literature, and Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, a semiotic treatise based on an invented system Barthes calls “Japan.”