When candor is your
friend,
you have freed your
nature,
and you will have her
style,
Sikong Tu, the author of
Twenty-four Styles of
Poetry,
noted in a gnomic tone.
If candor is your
friend,
that means you honestly
learn to honor and revere
the God-given—genuine,
nature ineffable, nameless,
which you, its mount,
bear inside,
when unrestrained you
come
and as grateful leave
with words
true and plain and meant
well:
Thank you Heaven
for all the divine gifts,
openness of my mind
to heart and soul,
the white point
of candor,
avem gryphus
released from disguise,
any tricks and artifice,
from the Chimeras
and Scyllas who guard
life’s narrow straits,
from worldly
fouling masquerades
tipped to expire
like dead’s unchained breath.
Let my soul and heart too
stay,
be affirmed, clad, in
candor—
“white-robed” as your
candidate,
one to beauty who would
render
breath and ear as her
loving flute,
that openness which goes
and opens
love’s paths with new
divine tunes,
like two lovers to each
other
veils and clothes’
enclosed folds.
With eagles’ hearts and lions’
souls
(who once used to live
they say
in Scythia or Slavia of
olden lore)
that keep a hold on natural
whiteness
which sums and summons our
inner light
so that this style clear,
free and unrestrained
by any deceit, sham, or seeming
death
could tap the ore from
which a soul
only so winged, seeing
and honest
may extract such golden
elixir
and serve it as a fountain
pen, a stylograph, for poem
acts
borne and guarded by
that candor’s
guiding hand that moves us
across times.
.
