All right, I'm going to read a few poems to finish off
this evening, and maybe pull up some
of the ideas and themes that have
come in earlier in the evening.
The cover for this book, Rope, is
a detail from a painting by Brice Marden.
Brice Marden went to Japan and he
started doing these line drawings because he
was studying Japanese calligraphy,
and he became completely in love with the line.
Not what the line was saying in terms of its letter,
but the gorgeous energy and fluidity of the line.
He did a series of paintings that came off of the Han Shan
or Cold Mountain poems, that Gary Snyder and David
Hinton have both translated so beautifully.
So it was actually Lucinda's idea.
When I was looking for a cover, she said Brice Marden.
She knew I'd been to the show and loved it.
And I had given her the book, actually, of the Han Shan
drawings.
So I'm going to open this with the first poem
in the book, which comes off of seeing those paintings.
And the title is a title of a--
I think it's a six panel work that
was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York a couple of years ago.
The Propitious Garden of the Plane Image,
after the paintings of Brice Marden.
"By the time the Santa Anas travel from the ocean
to our inland desert, they've lost their name.
The palos verdes and mesquites know such winds
that rake through their pinnate leaves.
I live about as far from the source of these storms
as I do from the muses, their names
lost too since they've descended from Olympus
to hijack our moods and amplify the cosmic background noise.
So everything that needs to be said
can be said without the right words,
with only the gusts, so utterly themselves,
and the inner pattern that never falters.
The canvas is the path the mountain hermit takes, leaving
the city to purify his ears.
A path, but no sign of footprints.
Many pathways that loop and veer, and sometimes
touch themselves or each other for an interval,
then split and turn away.
How does a line become a path?
The way in is to choose a certain color and follow.
Get lost and choose again, the lines and the light."