I toss a handful into the air.
A handful of nonspecific stuff.
What is this that my hands are tossing?
I’m tossing handfuls of snow into the air.
Where am I getting all this snow on a summer’s day?
It must come from somewhere inside me.
I’m tossing handfuls of somewhere everywhere, all the way
up into the air, and it’s flitting down and amassing
atop the immaculate townships.
Tin roofs. Church steeples. Lines of parked cars.
Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness
as a figure wilts far below and wonders,
How can snow fall without falling in love?
Wherever I go, my furthest thoughts are lightly billowing.
Whatever is buried within me, I keep
pulling out in tufts.
I hope that when I feel cold, you can feel what I feel
but without feeling any cold.
Because I have struggled to do so,
I choose to believe that
not all sadness comes from somewhere.
The sadness that comes from somewhere drifts down
and mixes with the sadness that isn’t from anywhere.
All of us are ordinary people. None of us
can escape the difficult nature
of being thrown away
by a warm afternoon in winter.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Hua Xi’s “Handfuls” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,