a grammar like sand:
particulates eroding
like skin from a hand.
See how the hills keep
getting looser, lower.
The language spoken
here is analytic
and isolates word
from word, aftereffects
of loss. It gets borne aloft
easily, is called loess.
Is letting go. The eros-
ion is land
not desisting from shifting
somewhat sideways,
as unresisting
as Eros under the covers,
not lifting its fingers
as soil persists in drifting
into air. It’s used to it,
the Yellow River’s familiar
sheet pulled over and over
overhead. A million
cubic meters spill over
each hour. A million
dead as the river mulls over
the placement of its mouth.
I knew the language
belonging to this land,
to people who abide here.
But the words head elsewhere
from my mouth and
tell me as they leave:
Whatever said to belong
is what can be lost.
Whatever gets said
belongs to what is lost.
What can be lost
is whatever can be
or said to be. Loss is
whatever fits this
grammar, is rarely mis-
pronounced as loess.
Can you imagine trees here
and that I once spoke
like a native?
Now soil collapses in comma-
shaped canyons, cradled
by the arc of a river
that changes its mouth so
often, but whatever
I can say or save from
its excesses, emending
old routes like time
an old tongue, it ends
empirically
. in the sea.
Angelo Mao is a research scientist. He earned his Ph.D. in bioengineering from Harvard University. His first book of poetry, Abattoir (2021), won the Burnside Review Press Book Award. He was born in California and lives in Massachusetts.