Many inquiries experienced me. Whipped by tails of their horses
or handiwork, always the struggles toward a clearance to succumb.

With the speed of being sought by seeking, I was aroma.
I was a vast space at the end of the run. There were moments

between my dissonant fingers, their sad white chords: a fiddle song
swinging its sphere around its pivot. Another was dropping
the loosened spools to sing pointless operettas—a ruffle of this,

or some other lute jazz. And always the laughing: alfalfa, alfalfa.
Searching forward, it was all downward squall and mad poinsettia.

And then the princess cut wearing her spring tiara condensed
a symmetry that mocked the fluid flower. But they were already
spinning their canes, flinging their coats around ghost-things

to try to count them. To believe in these fixated nothings
while reasons evaporated clinging to my lift, their lover of air.

There lived a valiant reason that cast its net far. It led to no whales
or castanet sounds, but caught a guttural later. At its end between teeth
the birdsong: fury, fury! why is the light? who is this unfamiliar?

Light had floored its slow unknowing and after it passed, there was
only a stone. So when the combs brought them self-knotting, I settled
into a dewdrop to die again, but wilt of wanting, cusp of new distance.

Why is silence so everywhere cold and mine? They think I am mysteries
that refuse to go anywhere and resemble a conduit to music.

—Soyoung Jung

Soyoung Jung's work has been published or is forthcoming in The Journal. Spinning Jenny, and Web Conjunctions. She practices law in San Francisco.

Originally published in the summer 2005 issue of Boston Review