This is another poem put together
from working with text, which is to say stealing and hoping
no one finds out about it.
If you're going to do it, do it as I
did this one, which is a book published
in Hong Kong anonymously given to me by a wonderful student
and poet friend of mine named Garrett Hongo.
It's called T'ang Notebook, and it's 300 poems
from the T'ang Dynasty.
As I say, it translated anonymously
and published in Hong Kong.
And I can't even remember.
I like to think I can't remember which are my lines
and which are its lines anymore.
But it's been years since I wrote it.
So who can remember?
They're a series of little short pieces called T'ang Notebook.
The Tang dynasty of course is the 700 and 800
AD, the great flowering of Chinese poetry, Tang Dynasty.
Known for Li Po, Wang Wei, et cetera, et cetera, [INAUDIBLE]
great famous Chinese poet.
Fine clouds open their outfits and show us their buttons.
Moonlight widens the waves.
Step on your own song and listen to mine.
Not bitter like yours, not flicked raw by flashes of dust.
Already over Italy the cold sun rises.
How I would like a mountain if I had
means enough to live as a recluse.
I would like to renounce it all and turn
toward the ash gold of flame mullioned between the palm
fronds.
That constellation with its seven high stars
is lifting its sword in the moonlight.
Sorry.
It's lifting its sword in the midnight.
I love you, dog.
I love you.
Remain here and lengthen your days, Pilgrim.
Fame is a mist of grief on the river waves.
The low wet clouds move faster than you do,
snowed moon, your jade hair sleet and grown thin.
All night I ask what time it is.
Stories of passion make sweet dust.
Sunset like a girl's robe falling away long ago.
An old song handles my heart.
Outside the side door, a luck- spider,
huge in the flashlight's lamp, rappels down the air
to single a stitch and make her starred bed.
In the dark past the hemlock, something
with small bright wings has come from a great distance
and is tired and wants to lie down.
Night spreads its handful of star clusters
in one eclipse above the palm tree.
There are shuddering birds and dead grasses
wherever I turn my face.
The 10,000 star fish caught in the net of heaven
flash at the sky's end.
Gulls settle, like grains of dust, on the black sand.
Lady of light, Donna Dolorosa, you drift like a skeleton
through the night clouds.
The surf comes in and goes out like smoke.
Give me a sign.
Show me the blessing pierced in my side.
This wind that comes in off the Pacific, where
the color of mountains both is and is not,
ripples the distant marsh grass and the gray doors of the sea.
The evening begins to close like a morning glory.
Like fear in a little boat, the light slips under the sky.
When the mind is loosened and borne up,
the body is lightened and feels it too could float in the wind.
A bell sound between here and sleep.
A water egret planes down like a page
of blank paper toward the edge of the noon sky.
Let me, like him, find an island of white reeds
to settle down on, under the wind, forgetting words.