Night Drive Through My Own Life – Hua Xi

I was so blank a gust of butterflies
could have migrated through me.

You did.

In conversations with my mother
I have no idea who is dead anymore

when I play the tape back
and hear only
my own voice which has become a farmland.

I was driving at night
through a lifetime

that was not my own.

That was a long time ago.

And the twilight elms
rustled up against each other,
ignoring me.

I kept turning around to get a good look
at the someone who I was yesterday.

Her, in the portrait.

Here I’ll stop for a while just
to watch the last winter on the branch
become an orange,

watch our memories
growing up.

Now she is an actress
in a falling scene.

Now she is busy
with something other than being alive.

Hua Xi is a writer and artist. Their poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica and The Nation.