Yuan Chen
(779–831)
Letter Smuggled in a Fish
Your letter unfolds and unfolds forever.
I flatten it with my hands to read:
tearstains, tearstains and a trace of rouge
where it must have touched your cheek.
Peach Blossoms
Infinite peach-blossom shades,
her rouged and powdered cheeks.
Spring breezes help her break my heart,
blowing peach petals from her dress.
Old Bones
1.
All the quiet afternoon splitting wood,
thinking about books, I remembered
Snyder making a handle for an ax
as he remembered Ezra Pound
thirty years before,
thinking about Lu Chi.
Using an ax, I forget the ax.
Closing my eyes, I see.
2.
Thirty-one new yellow daffodils
bloom in the little garden.
Alder seed covers everything
with little flakes of rust.
A breeze through evergreens.
Distant bird-trills.
When Hui Neng tore up the sutras,
his bones were already dust.
3.
Wanting one good organic line,
I wrote a thousand sonnets.
Wanting a little peace,
I folded a thousand cranes.
Every discipline a new evasion,
every crane a dodge:
Basho didn't know a thing about water
until he heard that frog.
The Gift of Tongues
Everything I steal, I give away.
Once, in pines almost as tall as these,
same crescent moon sliding gently by,
I sat curled on my knees, smoking with a friend,
sipping tea, swapping coyote tales and lies.
He said something to me
about words, that each is a name,
and that every name is God's. I who have
no god sat in the vast emptiness silent
as I could be. A way that can be named
is not the way. Each word reflects
the Spirit which can't be named. Each word
a gift, its value in exact proportion
to the spirit in which it is given.
Thus spoken, these words I give
by way of Lao Tzu's old Chinese, stolen
by a humble thief twenty-five centuries later.
The Word is only evidence of the real:
in the Hopi tongue, there is no whale;
and in American English, no Fourth World.
To Amy, before Her Wedding
Thirty years ago,
on a sunny August day,
I married my muse.
I did. And the vow I made
then rings as true today as
ever. I waited
fifty years for marital
bliss. I sat in the
utter emptiness alone,
alone as we each must be
before we can give
ourselves away. Then I gave
it all away and
found myself a wife to love
who understands my practice.
"Practice makes perfect,"
my piano teacher said
when I was a boy.
Practice is everything
according to Hui Neng-tzu.
That is why I try
today not to try to write
the poem I'd like
to write for you—because I
must empty myself of self
before I can see
even the simplest of truths.
Hayden's right. Poems
are an act of love writ large,
made permanent by writing.
Here at Kage-an
the shadows quickly grow. What
endures, what flowers,
is only the love we've placed—
tough-minded, big-hearted—within
each and every poem.
