The T’ang Chinese did it best, a poet’s solo
in progressions gathered from wilderness,
while he stood beside the long, vertical scroll of a cataract
hung by a natural god,
its script the Heraclitean flow of the Way.
Or sitting on mats at tea with a friend and fellow bureaucrat
posted on borderlands far from the capital of their educations,
the two of them engaged in brisk repartee,
citing amiably from “The Book of Songs,”
their light banter a fellowship of otium,
the lyric axis of contemplation,
while the world persists awhirl in famine, regional war,
or harvests of plenty.
What they took from one another, gazing at the festival moon
as it rose over crags of mountains,
the slithers and fountains of rivers
surrounding their hut, ten-foot square,
was a joyous loyalty to reflection,
a stilling of the mind that invites the soft thoughts
of an unknotted wind,
caravels of contentment with the Grand Whatever. . . .
Let it be was not to them a credo, but daily practice,
a hermeneutics of calm retreat
like those aquamarine waters below my window today,
only ripples and whorls like sapphire fingerprints
and ephemeral wings of bleu de France upon the sea.
In M*A*S*H, the colonel in command fly-fished a trickle of stream—
the middle of the Korean War—checked out and privileged
to pull a wineglass and bottle of Chardonnay from his creel.
Did he have it right?
A firecrest chitters, cicadas claxon in waves,
clicking their thoracic chambers of amplification,
and an excursion boat’s engine drones on through the harbor,
trailing a long wake of immaculate lace over the channel’s
Persian-blue table.
The slate sea fills my window, and I can see the horizon line from here,
the white palette knife of a sail just below it,
and I wonder if the pale flamingos of Camargue
might present themselves to me someday. . . .
Why has this lesson been so hard to re-learn all these years,
why have I allowed the settled law of my soul to be disrupted
by tyrannous magistrates of the everyday,
a groundswell of incessant woe flushing
a salty tincture of gentian through my mouth,
my head constantly hung like a seabird hunched before its dive
instead of lifted to meet the new day’s yellow light?
I’ve strong espresso in the morning,
and some kind of warbler makes its melodic cry outside my window.
I can’t see Africa from here,
but I can feel its continental drift,
a steady tumulus of soul-making,
arising from perigee and about to cross the expansive idylls of ocean.
If only I could stand the infinite measures, wait long enough,
and not waste their buoyant resolve.
If only I might dwell in Emptiness the rest of my days.
This is drawn from “Ocean of Clouds.”
