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.
I sit at the bottom of a shallow sea.
Above the surface, the old mountains are all wavy,
leaning down. They are stooped and as patient
as the deserts of wizened lizards they will become.
The new one, the one I will drive over to work
the one on which I will see the maple’s early change
the one on which I will see the brown bear’s lazy gaze
the one on which I will stand with my aging father
has still not taken its first tectonic steps.
It’s not even the apple in extruding lava’s eye,
yet by the time I am old enough
to put on these eyeglasses
it will already be ten-times diminished
from its highest peak. I miss this part as
A big thing blocks out the yellow white sun above me
and swallows an ancestor or two.
When it is gone only the Star River shows the flow.
When the uninvited hand grasps your wrist
no matter how softly
something good is not coming
with that other hand
I know these petals unless pressed
in your own life’s book will not survive
and even then as a shadow of love’s shape
or unless adrift in your river’s endless flow
come to outline any eddy worth circling
and even then could gutter off a bank or
regret’s cold stone where air
tears at life’s evaporating edge
or unless emblazoned with wing
of robes softly opening to heat and
even then burn only as a blindfolded
assurance of need, need:
or unless left alone a becoming
drifts around it, swirls it down just so
like snow a mile up lands finely
at the foot of the sky
Even below freezing, the slight snow
melts under sun to show hard ground
But behind the tree trunk’s bulk it stays
whitish, slow-blurring across the day’s drift
On a night of grief
light snow stings like glass: your eyes
search these fallen stars
I crack the window, listen:
What message can this cold wind carry
but this breeze won’t tilt my room’s way and come in
I reach out it slips through my fingers
Unkind even to the moon it has taken a little off the top
Diminished month sent howling through the pines
Unauthored, not meant to be read –
or merely hurrying by, a forgotten promise?
There is no shape of the tree
though we identify the tree by its shape
what I see in trees and steel sky
is patience and distance
If river ice or puddle ice breaks
under the weight of the waning moon
what we’ll find beneath is the waning moon
can I love you any more fully beneath this sheath of being?
Like a terminal bud, the future sits in dark resilience, weathering the present’s timeless winter, wrapped in the protection of tight embryonic leaves of the past, of memories packed in but not yet ripened which will unfold at the right moment, under accidental warmth or the persistent downpour of circumstance, they will unfold, crowning and surrounding that which has not yet happened in sudden green gestures growing as they are revisited and directing the warm rain of the mind to the center where the fruit is forming. All the colors of the spring are memories blooming and feeding the future. All this time we have misunderstood the past, blamed it for distracting us from the task at hand; it was never like that. Wasn’t the task at hand always shoveling snow? Wasn’t it always salting the walkway? Still we could not escape the present as we cannot escape a blizzard, the white-out of no context, the compulsion to turn one’s head from a cold wind. And when the future is finally ready, when the memories darken slightly in their turn across the sun’s ninety faces then the present will come, not knowing why it is coming, as bee or bird or squirrel come but do not know why, and take the future on the only journey it cannot travel itself. And if we wonder why we lose the memories it is because their work is done, they can finally loosen and twist away in the tug of the present. Already we will have forgotten what it was specifically that was done, the hand on your back lightly, the walk through the teeming streets, but it will have served the reason for that touch, its continuing love, it can be forgotten for the love is still waiting, just ahead, it has never left you, it has always come back, even as the ground beneath you stiffens with frost, it is what makes you see beauty in the momentary lapse of attention to the present which we mistake for the present moment, beautiful even in the coldest full moon of the year bright on the metal roof of an empty house.
No bird in the bare trees this evening
No rain or wind, no snow’s cushioned silence.
The twisted branch is capped, the sap beneath waiting
The clouds are without qualities this mild lonely night
In hours with wind from the north their drift would be enough
Even the moon behind them is too bland
Oh where is the weather to absorb sorrow
This vacant dark not empty only reflects
Translations from the English 