Hsü (Waiting/Nourishment) (for Michael Bushnell)

After twenty-one rainless days

            The clouds drenched the hills in the night.

This morning the sunlight shines in the high blue sky

            And drops in the sparkling dirt, working up the winds –

Lords, what gusts! – roaring through the sycamore leaves

            And muting the grackles’ racket. In the house,

Beethoven stutters from Michael’s fingers.

            A stutter. He backtracks. It rings again.

David and John in the far grove chainsaw their cord wood fuel –

            A dragon babe squalls for her mother’s dugs.

Fat green sweet corn carouses in the breeze,

            And I sit under a cherry tree, above a rug of cherry pulp,

Under blue sky, in new sonata,

            But not as it was written – stutter, backtrack,

Ringing out again, creation still unfinished.

Hsieh (Deliverance)

Late that day,

When the storm had dissolved

Three weeks of drought and drenched the hills,

The fields of eight-foot corn were blue,

Red mist passed through the terraced ridges,

The sky in patches, magenta and steel gray,

And fireflies drifted like green signal buoys

Untethered from the workaday earth.

Come on, Dizzy Cat! Out of the wet grass!

Slap your six-toed paws on the muddy path!

Let’s go home and towel down and have dinner.

They’ll be happy tonight in the city –

The clouds will deliver.

Valley Winds

I’m told by second mind they’re not to be compared,

            The valley winds.

                        Each comes in its turn.

1. The wind is hard as rock

That breaks the tide,

But rock and ego are worn down.

2. The wind is maya, the city-grid,

Succulent thirty-foot poster

Of tits and jean-jacked buns

And pouting lips, and money numbers

On receipt. You invented it.

In the deep sea, no winds stir.

3. The wind presages spinning wheels of wings, and

In them faces. Countless is their number.

Cool they are now, but soon they’ll burn

Along the paths that lead to suns

That are not stars,

Just as those mountains aren’t the earth.

4. The wind blows through my eyes,

Rattling the spruce cones there.

Eyes beam out and tangle up,

And knot the breeze.

But here they sit together, on a hill,

Eyes and breeze,

Gazing full of love,

Their backs to their infinities.

Tripping Again on MDMA, Love’s Amphetamine, Under the Waxing Moon

Didn’t the Master of Orange warn you enough,

Inscrutable soul, against filling yourself with easy vision?

Cheap magic goes straight to cheap wisdom, and

            Cheap wisdom goes straight to cheap heart.

Well, what has the Master said that he didn’t take back somewhere,

            Like those yellow cut flowers that say “I nourish you” by day,

Then take the air from your mouth in the night.

            At night I’ll trust in the Moon, changeable and cold though she be.

Dry and ruler of humors, closest to us of the outer gods,

            She holds us much better than she holds the sun.

The sun is happy to be sober. So there you are. At night,

            I trip out, I wear black, and walk up the path with my black cat.

A Visit Home

Oh what a night!

            Mosquitoes suck me dry, and I sit

On an oak stump in half lotus

While my mother cooks chops in the kitchen.

The scent of them fills the nearly still air.

            A dense chord of leaves, rustle of a June night,

Flat rumbling from the parkway down below the woods.

            Our neighbors’ houses are white in the moonlike streetlamps’ light,

And perforating the summer night

            Fireflies, and the stars.          

The Clouds Come from the South

What a change! Today, the clouds

            Come from the south, over the steaming ridges.

This is brand new weather. They fly so low

            The sparrowhawks seem to duck to the treetops.

In one breath, the Great Mother makes her

            Armada, along with the wind that drives it,

The lazy keels hanging down, gliding

            Toward their shores, the higher ridges.

Ta Yu (Possession in Great Measure)

I have nothing to say these days.

Heaven fills the sun and the clouds.

And the words that do come, drift

through our conversations like the mist

In the cedars.

No breezes fly today. The still West extends

From the distant ridges, and my stillness

Extends from my perch on this fence.

Swallows carouse awhile, then fly to their nests.

No breezes tip their balance.

No breeze. Balance.