Riding the metro in Beijing

This was the first day: we ate rice porridge 
and drank hot soy milk, because it was 
too early for tea, the proprietress said. 

Then, you tiao, a strip of sweet fried dough, 
before we walked the blocks 
to the station, just two stops 

from the lamasery. On the metro windows, 
David Beckham and Yao Ming flickered, 
holograms, speaking for the disappearing 

rhinoceros. At the gates and at every censer, 
we lit the sticks of joss we had bought. 
I watched a woman pray, kneeling  

and prostrating, the fluid placement 
of her palms leaves moving in light. 
The temple was closed for thirty-two years 

after the revolution. Now you can see  
the Maitreya Buddha, two dozen meters tall  
in the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses. 

You can only see it in parts, as you turn 
your gaze up and up. I wanted tea, 
but there was still none. We took 

the next train, debarking at Tiananmen East 
and the great Gate of Heavenly Peace, 
a giant’s mouth, used for respiration and speech, 

as one scholar notes: as it happens, the gate 
was demolished and rebuilt many times, 
each new gate referring to its previous and more 

ancient. On the metro, a metallic voice says 
Please hold the handrail, first in Mandarin, 
then in English, from the time we descend 

to the train till we leave the station. The night  
before, we’d taken a taxi from the airport: 
we passed a spotlit Chairman, along with 

more neighborhoods than we could name  
or possibly see, each a new version of 
a previous street, and a story that  

we’d never hear. At the Happy Garden 
Hotel, we threw our bags on the bed, 
went down to the street. One of us bought 

grilled meat, covering a plate of rice. Men 
shelled peanuts on the pavement, 
ate them and watched us, new strange 

things in Beijing. Radiant with exhaustion, 
hallucinating almost, I took a bite 
of meat from the plate. It tasted of sticky 

rice, the charcoal fire, the broken 
peanut shells, the street. 

Snow on snow on snow

Sugars fall from my hand to cookie stars 
iced white, a prismatic sheen suggesting  
winter as an opal to catch the light.  
It will be yeast next, panettone, cake 
that is also bread, and more difficult. 
One can’t rush: the sponge first, not even  
a teaspoon of yeast for the biga  
that makes for a slow lift. It has been years  
since a fading in me began,  
a softening each year. I will let time unfold 

its secret of expand and contract, I 
will do my part. Think of how my father 
can improve and still not get better. How  
better is indefinable, a transmuting  
term. Twice this week, when I lay the cards 
in a Celtic cross, Death appeared, once 
as my strength, once—so obvious 
—as the future. Various oracles  
say, not literal death, but the end of 
a way of life. It’s only cards, but still, 

what is the not-literal passing I must 
release, if I am to let anything go?  
hopefulness, unmoored by any evidence? 
Tomorrow, when the biga has ripened, 
I’ll add the yolks of eight eggs, sugar, butter 
to be worked in bit by bit as the dough 
resists it. It would not be itself,  
panettone, diminutive of bread,  
without all this, without the beaten- 
in fats that take a strong arm to persuade 

the dough, and the prescribed rest too, a sleep  
as the dough holds bits of chocolate  
and cherry, and greatens in the bowl.  
I once had a list of people to whom  
I’d deliver it, cut and fanned on  
Christmas plates. When finally I tip it  
from the pan, I’ll slice it, run across  
the street in the dark to my friend, the one 
whose husband died this past year. We’ll sit 
on her sofa together, we’ll eat it warm. 

LISA BICKMORE

Lisa Bickmore is the author of three books of poems, most recently Ephemerist (Red Mountain Press, 2017). She is the founder and publisher of the independent, nonprofit Lightscatter Press (lightscatterpress.org), and in July 2022 was named Poet Laureate for the state of Utah.