From Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, which will be published next month by Graywolf Press.

Some people say Tsukimi Ayano makes her life-sized dolls
out of loneliness. I don’t know what materials she uses—

foam, horsehair—or where the clothes come from, the hats.
She was born in Nagoro, moved away, came back

to a village with only thirty-some people living there.
The birds were pecking the vegetables in her father’s garden.

She made a scarecrow so like him the neighbors passing by said,
“You’re up early.”

That was the first doll.
To replenish the village she made several hundred more,

slowly, it took years.
Like my mother passing by the agapanthus each morning,

Ayano speaks to the dolls who don’t speak back,
dolls who don’t last as long as humans

and other readymades. Three years max.
She dresses them in waterproof clothes.

There are no more children in the village,
her dolls sit at the desks now, or stand

at the blackboard in the pose of teaching.
They also fish, repair roads, wait for the bus, doze.

She places them at the entrance to the valley.
Valley of the shadow of what?

The mouths are the hardest part to make, she says.
“I pull the string at the mouth and they smile.”

Three thousand years ago, the first scarecrows were live
children who ran through fields.