Summer’s End
Alison Clara Tan
‘I hate people who don’t treasure themselves.’
— Hinoe from Natsume’s Book of Friends (2008)
Natsume, if your breath falls like raindrops,
stay inside. It must run in the family:
how even your fevers hurt when they break.
You follow summer’s end to a sailor skirt
that stains small on your hips, weds you
to paper and ink. At the banquet
you share sake with shadows. Learn
this is what you do now. Here a cat writhes
between shades of orange and grey,
shadowboxes in the dark. In the background
a man and his wife brew hotpot
to warm the blue veins in your skin.
Do you alone recall folding through houses
like hands on a clock,
how your bones shrank into the space
between tatami and floor?
The wife wets her hands with daikon,
waits for the day you unlearn thank you.
Morning bends deep at the waist,
beckons you to lean into the parade
of hands on your forehead. You practice
the art of swallowing, swallowing
till the cat casts a line by the river,
hooks the quietness that catches
like a fishbone in your throat. Natsume,
summers end. In this house
your name is papered in every light.