East of me, west of me, full summer.


How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.


Birds fly back and forth across the lawn


                                         looking for home


As night drifts up like a little boat.




Day after day, I become of less use to myself.


Like this mockingbird,


                       I flit from one thing to the next.


What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?


Tomorrow is dark.


                  Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.




The sky dogs are whimpering.


Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening


                                           up from the damp grass.


Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,


Go quietly, quietly.

The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,


Like the structure of music,


                            seamless, invisible.


Even the rain has larger sutures.


What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together,


Is faith, it appears--faith of the eye, faith of the ear.


Nothing like that in language,


However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms


Blown by the wind.


                 April, and anything's possible.




Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.


A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India


And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on 


                                                               foot.


Ten thousand miles it took him, from 29 to 645, 


Mountains and deserts, 


In search of the Truth,


                    the heart of the heart of Reality,


The Law that would help him escape it,


And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.


                                               And he found it.




These days, I look at things, not through them,


And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.


The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,


The neighbor's back porch light bulbs glow like anemones.


Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.


This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,


                            when everything starts to shine out,


And aphorisms skulk in the trees,


Their wings folded, their heads bowed.




Every true poem is a spark,


              and aspires to the condition of the original fire


Arising out of the emptiness.


It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.


It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by.


Shooting stars.


April's identical,


             celestial, wordless, burning down.


Its light is the light we commune by.


Its destination's our own, its hope is the hope we live with.




Wang Wei, on the other hand, 


Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River 


Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,


                                                     and lived there,


Off and on, for the rest of his life.


He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,


A part of nature himself, he thought.


And who would say no


To someone so bound up in solitude,


                           in failure, he thought, and suffering.




Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small 


Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge.


Getting too old and lazy to write poems,


                                      I watch the snowfall


From the apple trees.


Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.

The brief secrets are still here,


                            and the light has come back. 


The word remember touches my hand,


But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel


Against the occluded sky.


All of the little names sink down,


                            weighted with what is invisible,


But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair. 




There isn't much time, in any case.


There isn't much left to talk about


                            as the year deflates.


There isn't a lot to add.


Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels


Wherever a thing appears,


Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable


                            in their mute and glittering garb.




All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us


                                      out of the


      Blue Ridge.


All afternoon the leaves have scuttled


Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.


And now the evening is over us,


Small slices of silence


                  running under a dark rain,


Wrapped in a larger.