Worshipers in Japan bow and clap to gods,
and, in the clap of meeting hands,
entrance into the divine
is turned to sound,
and the sound, the air’s crack,
reaches from one’s heart
to the below and into the above
where the deathless hardly ever tapped
forks and curves to our fates,
their chartered path,
whereupon a thoughtful note
may come and melodically pulse
to pass — into the sheet of light
for fans of arms to sieve delight.
On the word of I Ching Hexagram X,
it seems many women sit
on a man’s “tiger’s tail”
and so do men, contrariwise,
on a tiger’s tail a woman
lies down behind—
where one, the joyous,
makes an open place,
a chance, for the other
to create, even as what poets do,
something of a happy mishap,
and if something bites, it should be
Love for whom arrows fill his pack,
and thus what is weak worries the strong,
and, in this game, the strong needs to give in.
For this is the way — to please the wild.
And perhaps it is just as right
that, on the tiger, the tail, if treaded well,
ought to be the most tractable part,
though people are fond to forget:
good manners better serve a love
as they fortify thinking of the heart,
thus stillness of the lake in clarity
holding on unmoved follows
Heaven and, in Heaven,
allows itself to be dressed as joy.
Almost noon and the fading moon
still afloat in the celestial froth
in the western azimuth —
but now feigning that she is
not more but another trifling cloud
among other ephemeral gasps —
at least for those whose gaze
either quickly passes by
or barely lifts off the ground:
since what else is there to be seen,
up in the sky — when, there by the sea,
all’s daubed and shaded in whites and blues,
and some tense birds, picking, pecking chasers
into Aphrodite’s foam, are then rushed in turn?
Instead of taking the path
of the main approach
that came into my view
only at the very end,
like a goat I climbed
a steep slope of the hill
of the ancient ruins
of Syllaeum or Sillyon
with its many dried-up wells
or cisterns on the top
and an occasional spring
still gushing from old cracks.
And thus I circled round the town
searching for its theater
to see it swanning
with its rowing seats,
and only after much of wandering
I saw it last and found its fate:
the whole theater had crushed
down from the hill in 1969—
forty-four years before, being there pulled,
I came to see that site at last;
only some Odeon rows remained—
few feathers that had failed to fall.
“Three things that old music had: lyrics we could
understand, a story to be told and heart.”
—Anonymous comment to the song “The Windmills of Your Mind” (1969)
Ancient theaters of Dionysus
were as democratic as the people
in those times could make them be —
if possible, as large as to hold
all the male citizens in town.
But their Odea, theaters for music,
were strikingly smaller and fewer —
not unlike adornments — addons
that work at their best
if they strike the golden mean —
neither too much nor too little
but just enough, just right
to free the inside current
ripened in fruits of the notes —
but only for the chosen few.
And so — next to the many
and their entertainment’s roar
made of masks and tails and hooves,
they had these oases to which
pure beauty came, to be
and be plucked,
and just as it is equally strange
that to learn playing music well
takes all one’s time but much less to act,
and yet, as in love as opposed to
what goes — rather wrongly — in her name,
it is so rare to be treated to those finest sounds.
The interval (閒) is a chord,
a chord of the neckline’s slip;
there, by the rivière, turn by turn,
a serpentine flash might seem to sleep.
Or some reedy dragon with a licking flame
on the chest of leavened leaves, with breath
not unlike those buoyant pavilions of old
alighting and leaning on the lustrous lakes,
in the guise of somewhat boozy papillons,
but with manners and a genius for verse
that pluck a glint of shades from breeze.
Isn’t this how they gather our heads
and, once they do — they’d hold
and ponder — this hoard on their lap?
