Tricia Mae Chua

Life is too short to be spent
griping about the past,
things you don't have,
places you haven't seen,
...

You were a young leaf
A flapping shimmer of green
In the early spring sunshine
Happy, joyous
...

Even now I dream of you
In different forms and guises.
Simple joys of aery days—
Rooster crows to greet the morning,
...

The day opens with a gray nondescript sky
Yellowing leaves strewn haphazardly
on the patchy lawn below my bedroom window.
The air motionless outside except for an occasional breeze
...

Here is my early morning delight…
Lying together with you in a tangled heap of soft warm flesh just before dawn;
Chest to chest with your legs entwined in mine.
Your arms envelope me and draw me in closer until we come face to face.
...

Delicate pink petals
Raining down like confetti
On this gusty spring day.
...

A goat rope-bound by its neck
To a stake on the ground
The thing its center
and yet its bane
...

I scan through the cards on the shelf.
The simplest of tasks
Seems like the hardest thing for me to do,
trying to pick the right one for you.
...

Thinking of you
Rain pouring down
Dry oak leaves
Dark night embracing
...

Like bookends to a decade
You shy of forty by two
I two just off thirty
With pages of life in between
...

Fall 2007

I think of you, little winter wren
Sitting on the palm of my open hand.
...

You introduced me to the Star Rock and sat with me in that hallowed place,
To kytheing and to quantum physics,
...

There is a part of me that still grieves.
Do you see her? Can you hear her?
She is there by the corner, weeping.
A small disappointed child.
...

I sang myself back to sanity today.
The sun finally came out after a dreary yesterday.
Somehow I feel that the air around could sense
what was happening inside me.
...

Where does one begin to find someone like you?
Will he be hidden away within the pages of some dusty old book?
In between the verses of a forgotten poem?
In the words of a painful love song?
...

In the cool December air
Meeting you for the first time
Outside McPherson Square.
Your gentle face and warm smile,
...

Thirty five thousand feet above the ground,
I beheld a grand expansive space
Of silent thick cloudscape
As far as the eye could see
...

Driving to work
I catch sight of her
with her back towards me
making her way up
...

Shifty looks
A tempest brewing
Snake slithering
under white knotty skin
...

The smell of cut grass on a humid afternoon
Grandfather's old phonograph spinning out songs
Three friends sharing stories, a bag of chips and soda.
...