An early morning in Suwon

Teresa M. Petro

7 am in Suwon

The grey building
against the grey sky
blurs. I squint.
Without my glasses
the building is simple:
lines running into each other,
broken parallelograms swimming
in fog. Where builders and grand
schemes once were

hands that scaled centimeters.
The passion those hands
worked with, the same
as a child's fingers grasped
around a pencil, pressing
letters onto paper. Here, my own fingers
reach into a new distance
between home and this place
that becomes further away.

I have to remind myself
this could be anywhere:
a bed below a window,
two foreigners wrapped around
each other in sleep, finding
comfort in one another's bodies:
toes curled, eyes half closed
after lost rest, without three days
of sleep slow rhythms wrap around

half rhythms. Thousands of miles into
small moments: the way he turned
our engagement ring around my finger
on the plane. Or how I pulled
a loose hair from his shirt as he
walked slightly ahead on a street
in this new, old city. Each step we take into
a place where I cannot begin to read
signs, a language that becomes black lines

made into a box, a square of characters
dancing the way
spilled ink moves down parchment
making curls and sense of itself.
In what could be abstracted
blots of a horse on water
I see paused interpretative dancers
making their way toward me, begging
to be understood or at least turned

into phonetics: parts of my own language.
These dancers will not spin
about though, but stay as they are:
signs of beauty: language
that rests beneath monsoon fog.
Pressed against concrete, our shadows
on the wall, mouths trusting our minds
foreign to this fog that curls itself
around window views, my eyes

that blink hazy though trusting
of this tea steam that rises against
the apartment walls, intertwining
with ghost hands that fold
around time passed, those bricks, these thoughts:
a quiet prayer to gather mantras,
murmur ohms into crossed languages,
rain, the bada of grey sky
above grey buildings.