From Kafka's Diaries: 1919
by Jennifer Hayashida

I wake to short steps in close order:  an upstairs march promising victory.
 
A new journal.  I have been reading old ones in Rieger Park beside the jasmine bushes.  I would have to cut through flesh to part these years, divorce the moon from my head to think clearly about what I imagined was important.

Irritated with spectacle, I free myself from diaries.  I become an insomniac, the bed bustling.  With one hand I ward off the visible, with the other I take note, passing alms from my left hand to my right.

In a dream my brother commits a crime and my sister calls out the punishment.  I write this with my head bent back, cheeks distended as if from an inflamed tooth.  My brother is in fact my father, my sister my aunt.

This office is imaginary and the past should not be entered:  my parents played gin rummy while expecting me; fussed with some gardening and as much carpentry as necessary.  The fig tree in our garden was the best my mother ever knew.  

Other poems by Jennifer Hayashida in ActionYes #3:
Two Men
Variations on a Sentence from Proust