The Picture of Jingan Temple

You look at me from the temple top.

A golden lotus, each petal a small tower

with shining layers, rising to the sky.

Our growth rings.

Each year we celebrate on the past

with fewer words, shorter sentences,

like bees swarming out of first year’s nectar,

and hiving in a cave of tenuous blank in haste.

But deeper feelings, acuter sensations,

and more tacit understandings,

captured by nothing but

this growth of time—

you plant anew every year; ascending dumbly

in our hive, a quiet honey color temple.

I believe this, my beloved. I really do.

But from the photo you sent so far away,

from the waving bells of your metal look,

why am l expecting something else to be brewed?

By pulverizing any extra sound of our belief,

why am l still waiting for a shape, a smell?