Some repetitive bird calls, punctuated by crows.
Closer in, my wife sketching icons
across the table, pen going back and forth
on rough paper. Two cats breathing
still closer on the table by my open book.
When I open my eyes all sounds disappear.
Except the old wall clock ticking, ticking
which I hear even where there are no clocks.
The yard could be silver overcast sky
seen through the lean branches crossing.
I could stare all night, disappointed thinking:
where is that confounded moon?
The moon, that old toad palace, has seen it all and tonight
I am seeing the world with moon vision:
from my dark house it is a soft ghost
of all the worlds it has ever been to someone
Looking out at it from their window at night.
I don’t dare turn on a light; then it’s my ghost
that will be visible. Pausing outside my son’s door
I look in—the moon’s light freezes on his floor,
pretends it’s not there until I leave. By a lamp
near our bed, my wife plays guitar while I write,
Years from now, when this house has fallen in and
a squirrel skitters across a branch at this height
it will hear a soft music, some murmured words
and see the moon slide behind a gypsy’s leaf.
we planted a seed
eleven years ago this night:
undying flowers grew
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
Translations from the English 