WHERE SHE WAS

Where she was
ticks off in my memory
like waves
of a thousand lights
and faces here
in Tokyo,
amid twilight places,
to take obsessive pictures
of a snowy city ablaze
in its midnight life
over clear star gazers
with a daughter's enigma
of lost love
as one eye fills with water
trying to breathe in
the presence of dangerous air
where rumors stretch now
in alleys and valleys
as in the poems of Yokio Mishima
spotted for casual
or sensual personal desires
from geisha dancers
in memory of a thousand days,
a stranger is not forgotten
nor one kiss on a dense stone
even in the zen garden of peace
as an innocent west wind
whisks past our fear-sweat
and the hot fires of adolescence.