Li Po and His Sightless Dolphin

When the countless admirers and readers of Li Po

look at the moonlight—do they see the self-same frost?

Refers to Li Po’s Thoughts on a Quiet Night

 

Only a small numinous breed of poets

carries in them that stillness of the night

that allows them to hear a soul’s whisper

nearby—by casting a gaze on far-off stars,

 

in a way similar to Li Po, one of the two

China’s greatest masters in this seer’s art

and one born where now is Kyrgyzstan.

But how else to hear and how else to tap

 

into that otherwise always present and

close and ever-uninterrupted occurrence,

welling into unobstructed Heaven’s paths

 

when all else is asleep or numb and down?

And in that vein Li Po left his little note:

lunar light is frost which to embrace is to die.

Of Orpheus’ Lyre in the Underworld (Or On the Art of Poetry in Today’s Hell)

 

Hell is an inducing endless forgetting

of how to catch and unmask principal lies

“Pour n’être pas les esclaves du Temps.”

 

We as humans are invested much

in the shades which we cast or shed

although still afar even from those bats

who see so ably in the deepest dark,

grasping so well inside their minds

anything they render like great poets

into resonance and percipient sound.

 

And to that seeing and knowing

to what all else is blind there is

a science and an art that draws,

collects and compiles what it can

from the Hades’ currents, transient

& incessant forgetting under the name,

a sentence Avec ou sans ce qui n’est pas.