Sunday, May 31, 2020

What Your Candor Bares (Honoring Sikong Tu)


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.
.

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