The ryokan owner brings our breakfast: morning kocha tea, loose, strong and floating in our own pot, rice bread two inches thick, our own orange toaster. My mother and I pick tea shavings from our tongues,

grasping at this needed taste,

nostalgia in silence, studying the Zen gardens in the courtyard, the sunlight,

the shadow-bodies on the balconies.

Then suddenly, the sound of her voice. “Don’t dump out the leaves,” she says.

“We can read them.”

A double clink as the liquid pours out, spreads over the saucer, squeaks drawn out with each turn, and then, brought to light.

(But where were these revelations before?) I’m straining to see stars, letters, anything in these brown constellations,

this new reversed sky of dark on light.

She peers into my teacup, her telescope, finding patterns. I study her bent head, redrawing maps in this moment, wondering at these opened routes,

this flush of enlightenment.