The white rabbit pounds the medicine

白兔捣药成，问言与谁餐？
(The white rabbit pounds the medicine,
But for whom to eat?)

I'm afraid I'm losing my ability to write.

The snakes have turned into hats and I have been
Worrying about loans and suturing while
The moon returns every night, begging for me to love her.

小时不识月，呼作白玉盘。
(As a child, I didn't recognize the moon,
Mistakenly calling it a white jade plate.)

"The moon walks and I walk too,"
My grandmother sang to me in the car last summer
As we chased the hurried night away.

Now I sing this to myself a day's flight away,
Memorizing drugs and pathways as an excuse to stay
As my grandmother treads closer to the moon.

One day I will start forgetting these names like keys,
My grandmother's rationality dripping from her like water.
She will not always be this sharp, this trusting,

But she will always carry her love for the moon.

蟾蜍蚀圆影，大明夜已残。
(The toad consumes the round shadow,
the great bright night is already waning.)

She does not suspect that I am the rabbit on the moon,
Blinded by the jade light, pounding my elixir,
For others and not for her—for others just like her.

I do not know how to confess this to her,
Lacking the words and the heart to reveal this to the woman
Who repeats phrases and memories like clockwork.

In her eyes I am still five, splashing and laughing,
Knocking over the tub of water on her apartment floor.
The rug was soaking wet that day, and the rug will remain wet.

She floats along her hippocampal seas, the tide withholding.