Suphil Lee Park
This is my temporary mind.
Stated thoughts,
black roses.
(I often write you out, then into
my mind.)
To verify this I have pictures
hung upside down: your lips
a flat line in conflict, clothesline
pulled taut by lightness.
I write from this mind.
You taught me math
in color: “Red + Blue=Purple.”
Imagination is an intraocular organ.
Night
an intrinsic factor in the sun
that converges to light.
A secret, an unstated fact.
An equation of vacuum lies
between 59
and 60,
11.8 and 12, night
and midnight.

I write you, for you are
not my secret.

Instead I wear you
like spectacles, refuse to blink.
Math in image: “Rain + Sun=Rainbow.”
To which I asked, “Sun=Bow?”
You answered, “Sun=Rain(Bow-1).”

This is my mind, analogous to a hat
that swallows my face but declines the name
mask. Emptied, it lies flat
like a bag. Unmask
yourself.
Mind, name. What is shared
cannot be secret.
In my mother tongue I say our
mother, to any of you
I’ve never met.
Our home, which I alone occupy.
If We=You + I, but We=I,
you is 0, pure
as it disappears.
Imagine: black roses
curled up in the lifeform of their deaths.
If the eye is the destination—
from the mind
—night diverges, becomes
light, vice versa.
No space is empty, unless emptied.
I want this space
between roses and the wind
to close.In time.
Imagine: the sun arching
to its limit,
a blister of lightto share.
The arrow, gone.
from the journal QUARTERLY WEST
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“Subtraction” comes from the idea that our mind, just as eyes, can zoom in on an important kernel of truth by blotting out distracting details. The poem repeats this act of subtraction as it explores modes of writing, pronouns, notion of time, culture and language, defining and redefining. In so subtracting, it adds nuances and layers to reiterated words and images. An exercise of focus and flexibility, just like archery.

Suphil Lee Park on "Subtraction"
Black-and-white headshot of Paul Laurence Dunbar, c. 1890
"Historic Paul Laurence Dunbar Home Reopens"

"The home, a National Historic Landmark, seems frozen in time as if the writer has just stepped out....In fact, the Remington Standard typewriter he used to compose poems, letters and newspaper editorials sits on a small table in his bedroom."

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Front cover of Modern Poetry in Translation
What Sparks Poetry:
Courtney Angela Brkic on Antun Branko Šimić's "The Return"

"To translate Šimić into English requires constant pruning, knocking phrases down to their lowest common denominator. My goal was faithfulness to the original while maintaining the spare intensity of Šimić’s lines, and our conversations often grew heated. I came to crave the moment my father snapped his fingers to demonstrate that I had unlocked the mystery in English."
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