“East Mountain Walks on the Water”

 

A Buddhist once said

            mountains give birth

to lucid lakes and clear streams

 

so that they, the mountains, can

            walk and glide across

both to one another and to

            people in the vales below,

 

and that’s how even infinities meet

as all the women who won’t forget

that their beginning is the same

as that of a well that knows that too

 

since deep down she listens just as well.

Thus, mountains give birth

to lucid lakes and clear streams

            and pout what is timeless

 

into cups of time—by which people pass

like beads of sounds

on the arrayed strings

in one merging consonance.

 

*****

 

And so, it struck me too

how strange, but how right and good,

that the name Buddha rings well

with hudba, the Czech word for music.

 

With a word said to defy flippant rhymes.