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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