Though the mountains lie far
From these Carolina plains,
White clouds, their loosened swirls,
Accost the tall and swaying pines
With such shape and grace,
Pressing downward,
As though in longing.
As if that silent beauty from above
Yearned to be held—
Held and stirred
By that coniferous hairbrush—
That it might release
An outpouring of rain’s crystalline lines
Upon those teasels
Teasing at its cloth and scarf,
Falling at last
Upon such resin-soft,
oil-painted wood.
Heraclitus, “the Dark One,”
Faulted water,
Reproaching it
For the soul’s death.
But who besides water,
When perfectly still,
Seizes and paints
The shades so well?
And yet how little time
We have down here,
In this moving world,
To see and contemplate
What water can reflect
Of a sunrise orange burst.
Those ancient lanes,
Those ancient routes,
Where rushing through
Would be a mortal sin.
Those whom one meets there
Are rare—
One of a kind—
Making one wonder
What has become
Of the timeless awe
Within the modern heart.
There one goes
To clear and cleanse
One’s senses
And one’s mind,
Far enough
From the capital,
Its fevers
And its glut.
And what
Of the Muses,
Whose memory
Has faded?
But there,
Alone
And out beneath the open sky,
Thought lends
Its quiet tune,
And brighter,
Deeper,
A sky rises
Above the cranes,
Just as time ripens
Enough to ask:
“Tell me—
What is truly
Capital in life?”
An old Chinese poet with sights set
on imperial favors and a job
found a way of putting in
a vision of the emperor’s harem
via the orchard of the pears nearby
and the fruit’s sweat-undarkened skin
so that, like pear’s scent of bloom,
his own poetic courting
would soak through the robe
of the Son of Heaven.
For how else would any
decent concubine
which wants to lay
with majesties and power
prove that she mastered
the proper art and science
and the proper wooing etiquette,
rending herself as the best—
as glories’ and greatness’
perfectly trained mirror
or a spotless, prostrated pool?
Or like a pear plucked,
a kowtowed figure—
knocking off
and losing
both her legs
and head even?
And isn’t there even for transience
of freshly snowing scents
written in the finest of the fonts
a certain kind of poesy
qua science as well as art
by which both the author
and the audience could extract
such favors or as much as they can
even from Hades’ incessant forgetting?
Just as there must be both art and science
the name of which too might as well
be a sentence—a sort of sine qua non?
