Ease

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Ease

Snow melts and water runs down the steep rock face of the cliff
perfectly and with such ease though each sideways stream
is running for the first and last time, no time to learn how to do it right,
each molecule a limited engagement with the rest until at rest

later this evening it will be ice again. I have always said love is work
but I didn’t say it was all work—what makes me want to work so hard
is my own effortless falling, every day as I am struck by your light,
transformed to something with ease, headed straight down under sun

On Translating a Poem from the Chinese

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On Translating a Poem from the Chinese

First you find a quiet place in the forest near a mountain. You set about clearing a small patch of land, building a house, moving a family in from the other side of the world, naturally they are confused at first, until you show them that everything is where it should be, including the dragon behind the falling water and beneath the icy pool and the distant dragon in the mountain and the fox behind the tombstone they cannot read and the toad on the moon and the orioles in the tree, and you set about showing them you have built the house where a breeze from the south protects against the red dust of the paths which led them here, and then you set about taking in the family’s exiles, who naturally drink more wine than anyone else yet seem not to have the same sense of vertigo upon arrival, because the moon is the same and has always been the same moon and one day when you are out looking for one of them who did not come home last night you find a plant growing on the dusty path and take it home, and when you get there the exiles are waiting wondering where you were and if there is any more wine, and then you set about placing the perfect plant in a window on the top floor that the family loves and the forest around it loves and that sounds as the last needle of sun skims the canopy of trees and glances off the window like the sound like rain on bamboo. And in the leaves of that plant the past of each of the house’s denizens has to be taken into account, and in every flower a future extending a thousand years. And then you turn your back on it as you turn your back on a dream upon waking, it has to melt back into the earth, artificial as it is, without causing harm. And the fox comes around looking for the garbage and in the middle of a clearing is the poem.

Two Consecutive Nights

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Two Consecutive Nights

[fog and ice]

Morning settled on the mountain and decided to stay.
When I passed through it earlier the peak stiffened
the moisture on my windshield into a new vision
neither reflective nor transparent. Now it is still
there! at nineteen hundred feet near sunset
morning is napping, the trees and shrubs and rocks
strangled in its white sheet. This ice-capped time
capsule; the past and future locked in a single seed.

[windy night]

Just last night the world was a bead
of dew caught in winter’s blink:
Now everything is moving. All things
fixed will flap, bend or break
and, even gently pulled free
by its invisible roots and spinning
westward must join a thousand
voices mourning the passing moment

Two Poems About the Moon, one mentioning the moon six times and the other not mentioning the moon at all [new translations]

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Two poems about the moon, one mentioning the moon six times and one not mentioning the moon at all

 

Sky Dream

Li Ho (790-816)

In the sky, that cold toad’s eye weeps.
Between towers of cloud its clarity slants, unstuck,

a jade wheel rolling anew in each drop of dew, glinting
off imaginary immortals on the fragrant path as they meet

and watch dust and ocean trade places beneath the Three Mountains
and even as they blink a thousand years run by like horses. Meanwhile,

way up there, to the toad the great nations are nine wisps
of angry mist and the wide ocean of sorrows a small spilled cup.

 

Still Night, Thoughts

Li Po (701-762)

Moon’s so bright before my bed
I mistook it for frost glowing on the floor.

I lift my head, and old hopes, to that moon,
then back down, eyes full of a dream of home.

 

–translated by Jeff Schwaner

Pondering the New Moon

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Pondering the New Moon

It is not as the full moon shines on us both
that I am missing the walks we took at the edge of dog stars
it’s with each full moon I am aware that you go on
and what the moon looks down upon is what I am missing

After a Moment of Silence for a Sudden Death

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After a Moment of Silence for a Sudden Death

Who are these birds gathering the empty branches
outside my window into a tree again?

Thirty feet above the roofs of a hundred mourning cars
they wick out patterns of mid-afternoon orange and black

that amplify the slanting sun then come back to settle,
at ease, as if already new green leaves protected them.

As if all our thoughts about our departed colleague
had gathered outside to look back at us, prepare

as memory does for flight, disperse to the future
wherever winter thoughts fly to in spring beyond sight

Drinking Sake with You

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Drinking Sake with You

 

Remember that warm anticipation
before the red dust obscured our ease
and the houses blew the sky down?
On this night the walls are so cold and
distant peaks enshrouded, I know what I’ll do:
I’ll sit here nearby. Sip a cup with you
as a star comes out. Let it all settle
until the world is clear again.

On Saying Goodbye

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On Saying Goodbye

 

Trying to catch up with the hills rolling
beneath my feet I’m lost to your light

then at the mountain’s top you are waiting for me
unmoved by the ruckus and dust below

in this valley I’ll hear a bird, catch my breath
then keep running west til the Star River

laps at my feet–who would not climb mountain
after mountain to keep saying goodbye to you?

[new translations] Grasses, by Po Chü-i

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Grasses

 

Parting and parting the grasses on the plain
which one year withers and one year flourishes
which burns again but is never destroyed
a spring wind blows over this life resurging

its fragrance trespasses old paths in the distance
even to the abandoned city comes jade clarity
as we part again, my friend, separated by world’s wind
it’s as deep grasses parting on a crowded plain

–Po Chü-i (Bai Ju-yi)
translated by Jeff Schwaner

 

A poem by my son

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Note: the family is sitting around trying to write verse inspired by music for a contest (“The Writer’s Ear”) sponsored by the local schools. Here is what my six year old son August came up with. It should be further noted that this verse is illuminated in magic marker and that the poem’s narrator is a fire-breathing monster of some kind. But regardless of that, I think the last couplet is a keeper for all of us.
 

I’m tearing down a building
my friend is a skunk

I need a little friend
when I’m in a big fight