Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Even

A shadow needs a time in the sun, even if the sun kills it, and white 
     wants
some color on its unbroken plain.

I get out of my chair and walk to where I don't belong because it is 
opposite to what I know.

A child knows this better than a grown woman; a baby who somehow
climbs up a ladder to an above-ground pool and falls in and drowns 
     knows this

When you close your eyes and take a little flight into sleep, you are the 
shadow, the child, and me.

Face

I see you here, under the sun
Which is the hole in the Dreammaker--
Face, turning and turning like meat in the fire
Face! Seep to the rim of this silver pot
With handles welded to the vision.
Hide among the animals and children until called
Or walk through the open gates
To desert spring.

Breezes

Their blueness gathers out the window,
Gently touching heads and meeting elbows
To get a better look at what's inside.
No one home but shadows cast
 By bicycle spokes and the backs of chairs
And the dizzy flight of an angry fly.

Sometimes a woman puts out her hand
To feed the breezes, and they in turn
Ease the back of her hand over the pages
Of curly words. Favor for favor--
Long-drawn breaths on a dish
And cup left in the sink, and cushion
In the doorway embedded with sleep;

Tap-tapping at the glass pane,
Wanting my company.

Wing

Shame is essential in beginning a story, the 
shame of having left without explanation. In finishing the 
story, that you need to explain the humanity of what you 
have done, what has happened to you, and explain it well.

For the middle, parts which have gone on without
my knowing (but perhaps, as I imagine), I am standing 
thus in front of a window, feeling the sting of the air on my 
skin (which is bare and open in every pore) and finding 
(With pain every present where there is the urge to speak in 
an empty room) that there are a thousand stories to affirm 
the negative of me and only one story to reverse it.

I am

changing my position, quieting my question.
Raising my voice as if certain
then I am frightened.

The window flew open wider;
pots, pans, and art clattered, thunderous
     inferring movement.

Tenderness--an invention.
Ferocity--throwing you back in your body.
Love--taken.

Wild

I found remnants of a cedar fire,
plumed and heart and soul
flinging themselves forward, fling backward.

Spirit rises as if a solution were
a trick of the senses. While the weather-
lighting, as now, starting fire.

These proportions of warmth,
hail on the roofs bring the present;
are remembrances for the imagined.

Words in Paradise

Will you believe me when I tell you I'm fine, or
wish to die, both are very near in my mind. I feel bouyant
when I believe in fineness as death. It's when I think of
tonight and what I need to get for my fridge like milk and
other supplies to continue functioning. Then I feel as if I've
dropped something that is, itself, so slight, that no one has
noticed. I turn around without intending to retrace my
steps, since the past is shifting with future needs.

Spine

What is the traveler's spine--distance? A
more circular support-hello or that other word that
made you look out your window that time, sorrow.
I've been examining coats of paint for their reason for
lasting, all this hope for destination (only a figment in
a whale's eye). I divide the world into underground/
surprise. The part that floats is, perhaps, history. This time
of my life begins unequalled, unbalanced rootedness.

House

The construction (begin, finish), the dignity of
staying, the humanity of what you have done,
what has happened to you, and the named thing
you imagine.

Josey Foo obtained her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 after receiving degrees from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1990. She received the Eve of St. Agnes Award for Poetry in 1994, and in 1995, one of her essays appeared in The Best American Essays. Foo, a Chinese native of Malaysia, now works as a lawyer-advocate in Farmington, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. She lives in Farmington, New Mexico, where she and her husband run Crooked Shelf Books. Foo's first collection of poetry and prose, Endou, was published by Lost Roads Press in 1995. A second collection, Tomie's Chair, was published in 2002 by Kaya Books.
The poems here are reprinted from Foo's two published collections of poetry, Endou (Lost Roads, 1995) and Tomie's Chair (Kaya Press, 2002).