Template acting really weird, so posting before I lose the whole damn post.
My anthology this week is 300 Tang Poems, translation and notes by Innes Herdan. The book was published in 1987 by the Far East Book Company.
The Tang Dynasty ruled China for nearly 300 years, from 618 to 907. It was preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire. The dynasty was interrupted briefly by the Second Zhou Dynasty (October 8, 690 – March 3, 705) when Empress Wu Zetian seized the throne, becoming the only Chinese empress regnant, ruling in her own right.
The Tang Dynasty, with its capital at Chang'an(present-day Xi'a), which at the time was the most populous city in the world, is generally regarded as a high point in Chinese civilization—equal to, or surpassing that of, the earlier Han Dynasty—a golden age of cosmopolitan culture. Its territory, acquired through the military campaigns of its early rulers, rivalled that of the Han Dynasty. In two censuses of the 7th and 8th centuries, the Tang records estimated the population by number of registered households at about 50 million people. Yet, even when the central government was breaking down in the 9th century there as many as 80 million people under its rule.
With its large population base, the dynasty was able to raise professional and conscripted armies of hundreds of thousands of troops to contend with nomadic powers in dominating Inner Asia and the lucrative trade routes along the Silk Road. Various kingdoms and states paid tribute to the Tang court, while the Tang also conquered or subdued several regions which it indirectly controlled through a protectorate system. Besides political hegemony, the Tang also exerted a powerful cultural influence over neighboring states such as those in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
The Tang Dynasty is considered by most to be the greatest age of Chinese poetry, including the greatest of Chinese poets, Li Po, Wang Wei and Tu Fu, all three represented in the anthology and here.
Me
the past and the future as seen from here
Li Po
Descending Chung-Nan Mountain and Meeting Hu-Ssu the Hermit Who Entertains Me with Wine
Me
warrior queen
Mary Oliver
Mysteries, Four of the Simple Ones
Holding Benjamin
White Heron over Black Water
Me
tortured souls - and then there’s me
Han Yu
Presented Chan the Clerk on the Fifteenth Night of the Eighth Moon
Me
the pretty young girl who mooed like a cow
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
At the Bodega
Me
the sixth great extinction
Wang We
From My Retreat on the River Wang, For P’ei Ti
Autumn Evening in a Mountain Hut
Written on Returning from Mount Sung
Me
one day it’s like this
Joanna M. Weston
A Book Called ‘Poems’
Embarkation
Me
the cutting room floor
Meng Hao-jan
On Stopping at an Old Friends Homestead
Written in the Ch’in Country for a Buddhist Priest, Master Yuan
Me
making movies at Starbucks
Alex Stolis
Third Law of Thermodynamics
Pythagorean Theorem
Me
two women
Tu Fu
Climbing a Height
Spending the Night at the General’s Headquarters
Me
at this time of the year
Susan Holahan
How Light, for Example
The Park at Texas Falls
Me
the fall
Wei Chuang
Impression of Chin-Ling
Ch’en T’ao
Song of Lung Hsi
Chang Pi
For Someone
Me
can’t we all just get along
My new coffeehouse is right on the edge of all this. I hadn't been at this place in six to eight months and went there to take pictures right after I finished this poem. It's truly amazing how much work has been done in the short time since I had last visited.
I really do like San Antonio and all its histories and legends.
the past and the future as seen from here
sitting
in the back of the coffeehouse,
next to the practice studios
and the recording studio,
I can see straight out, past the little round tables
and chairs and the old desk with the chess set
waiting for the regulars who play,
past all that, out the large windows
that line two walls, through the windows
to the early August morning
already warming to the day’s predicted
101 degrees, past the outdoor cafe tables,
the umbrellas folded, as they will stay folded
for another two months, waiting for a new and
cooler season, past
the folded umbrellas to Broadway,
and the cars on Broadway, moving slowly
like motes of light in summer humidity, people
late to work, people who on this hot day
don’t care about being late to work, who, in fact,
will conspire in the afternoon to leave work an hour
early, driving slowly south on Broadway the few short blocks
to the shadowed streets of tall buildings downtown,
Broadway, itself, coming awake after years of sleeping,
high-rise apartments going up on one side of the street,
the great limestone castle that was the Pearl Brewery
on the other side, the brewery, a city landmark
in the process of rejuvenation, a new stop on the latest Riverwalk
extension, crowded now with construction workers,
as the four blocks of its boundary become a hive
of shops and restaurants and bars, the last bottle
of Pearl beer served twenty years ago, the castle gone
quiet, dusty and deserted then, awakening now
to new life, a day and late into the night life
of music and food and crowds and mariachis and women
in bright wide skirts dancing, and Broadway, the old street
running through the middle of it all, quiet, dusty and deserted
for many years but for the addicts and drunks and whores,
one of the oldest and most storied streets
of the city, the street that became a street
you drove without stopping,
windows closed tight, that street
cleaning up now, washing it’s face and hands,
shining it’s shoes, preparing to put its best foot
forward, the whores and addicts and drunks
still around somewhere and no one really cares where,
as long as it’s not here…
like the street cleaners who follow along after the
Fiesta parade, picking up the debris and confetti
of pomp and multicolored spectacle, the street is being cleaned
and the parade will come again
and the street will be alive again, lively,
with new music as the dead despairing songs
of it last years are swept away…
I can see all this from where I sit,
looking past the studios
and the tables and chairs,
past the great windows and the August morning,
past the slow, sleepy workers,
past all that in-between to
to the street as it unfolds
its new vision
and
being old,
I rejoice, as I always do
when I see the old and disconsolate
becoming young and vital
again
Might as well start at the top of the food chain with this poem by Li Po.
Regarded by many Chinese as their greatest poet, Li was in 701, probably in Turkestan. He left about 725 for what would be a lifetime of wandering. He never set up his own home, never sat for the official examinations and was never given any official appointment, probably due in part to his irresponsible nature and over-fondness for wine. He was for some time a Court Poet, but was implicated in some political disturbances and imprisoned for some months, but was eventually pardoned. His adventures and personality, along with his poetic gifts earned him the nickname of the "Banished Immortal."
He died in 762, drowning, when, according to legend, he fell, drunk, out of a boat while trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in the water.
Descending Chung-Nan Mountain and Meeting Hu-Ssu the Hermit Who Entertains Me with Wine
At dusk
I come down the green mountain;
The mountain moon
travels along with me.
Looking back
over the path I followed -
Blue, blue the mist
across the middle hills.
You lead me by the hand
towards your cottage;
A young lad
opens the wicket gate:
Green of the bamboos
invades the dim pathway,
Blue wisteria
touches my clothes as I pass.
Happily I cry -
"Here is somewhere to rest!"
Delicious wind
passes from hand to hand.
Long we chant
the "Wind in the pines" song:
The stars are almost set
when our singing ends.
The next poem is from 2006. I've used it here before, but it's one of my favorites because of the insight I gained from seeing what I saw and writing about it. I assume the girl is a Veteran, but I have no way of knowing that beyond the confidence with which she carried herself.
warrior queen
she walks,
no, not walks,
strides,
with the air
of a warrior queen,
her short skirt
flowing
with every step,
swished
by her swinging hips
in waves
like froth on a swelling sea...
her left leg,
firm and tan,
flexing
with every step
and the other
a construct
of metal parts
like the cyborg
in the first Terminator
rising
from the flames
free of artificial flesh
that hid the true power
of its titanium frame,
the girl's leg just like that,
a beautiful machine
of gleaming rods
and levers and joints
that move smoothly
like oil on glass
with every step...
how can we not
be entranced
when something
usually dark
and hidden from us
is revealed
in all its unexpected
beauty
From my library, I have three poems this week by Mary Oliver. The poems are from her book, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two, published by Beacon Press in 2005.
Oliver, winner of the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, was born in 1935 n Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland. When she was she 17 visited the home of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in upper New York state, became friends with the poet's sister, became friends, and "more or less lived there for the next six or seven years, running around the 800 acres like a child," and helping Norma with organizing the late poet's papers.
Mysteries, Four of the Simple Ones
How does the seed-grain feel
when it is just beginning to be wheat?
And how does the catbird feel
when the blue eggs break and become little catbirds,
maybe on midsummer night's eve,
and without fanfare?
And how does the turtle feel as she covers her eggs
with the sweep of her feet,
then leaves them for the world to take care of?
Does she know her accomplishment?
And when the blue heron, breaking his long breast feathers,
sees one feather fall, does he know I will find it?
Will he see me holding it in my hand
as he opens his wings
softly and without a sound -
ashe rises and floats over the water?
And this is just any day at the edge of the pond,
a black and leafy pond without a name
until I named it.
And what else can we do when the mysteries present themselves
but hope to pluck from the basket the brisk words
that will applaud them,
the heron, the turtle, the catbird, the seed-grain
kneeling in the dark earth, its body
opening i9nto the golden world?
Holding Benjamin
No use to tell him
that he
and the raccoons are brothers.
You have your soft ideas about nature,
he has others,
and they are full of his
white teeth
and lip that curls, sometimes,
horribly,
you love
this earnest dog,
but also you admire the raccoon
and Lord help you in your place
of hope and improbables.
To the black-masked gray one:
Run! you say,
and just as urgently, to the dog:
Stay!
and he won't or he will,
depending
on more than I could name.
He's sure he's right
and you, so tangled in your mind,
are wrong,
through patient and pacific.
And you are downcast.
And it's his eyes, not yours,
that are clear and bright.
White Heron Rises Over Blackwater
I wonder
what it is
that I will accomplish
today
of anything
can be called
that marvelous word.
It won't be
my kind of work,
which is only putting
words on a page,
the pencil
halting calling up
the light of the world,
yet noting appearing on paper
half as bright
as the mockingbird's
verbal hilarity
in the still unleafed shrub
in the churchyard -
or the white heron
rising
over the swamp
and the darkness,
his yellow eyes
and broad wings wearing
the light of the world
in the light of the world -
ah yes, I see him.
He is exactly
the poem
I wanted to write today
I'm hoping that the pain of creations is not directly related to the quality of the product.
tortured souls - and then there’s me
there was a beautiful
silver
crescent moon
at 6 this morning,
hanging like a skyhook
against the pale dawning sky
and below it
a bright star and above it
another bright star
and if I was a poet I’d know
the names of both those bright stars
and twenty-eight rhymes
for each
but I don’t know that
and in fact
don’t have a single poetic
thought this morning
after writing “silver, crescent moon,
blabbidy, blabbidy,”
so I couldn’t write a poem about the moon
and it’s attendant, mystery stars
anyway...
so
instead
I’ll write a poem I was thinking
of yesterday,
about some poets
who would be crushed by the aforementioned
poetic failure,
the long-suffering poet types
with dark, haunted eyes
who are mystery to me
as they always seem to suffer so,
even when they write a good poem
that would make me
sing
and dance
and cry out, hotdamn, look what I just did
if I wrote it
instead
they’d moan
how they missed the beauty of their
inner angel’s incandescent visions of
heaven or how sad it is that they didn’t identify
any answers to the mysteries of life
or solutions to the ills of mankind
or what a shame
they couldn’t come up with
a proper prayer
to rent
the curtains
of eternal damnation that
await us all
and
moan moan
how demanding is this curse of poetry
and they’ll probably
never
write a poem again
for weeks or months or years
or day after tomorrow…
me…
I just do it for the fun
and all the
fluttering
disappointed
hearts and haunted looks
remind me of the joke
about the guy who goes to a doctor
waving his arm around,
saying,
doc,
it hurts when I do this,
what do your
recommend, and the doctor responds
well,
quit doing that
The next poem from the Tang anthology is Han Yu. Born in 768, the poet died in 824. He was known as an assiduous scholar and enjoyed a successful career, holding many offices and rising in prominence to become President of the Board of Rites. Better known as an essayist than poet, he initiated a revival of Confucianism and the decline of Buddhism in China and to the rise of Neo-Confucianism of the later Sung philosophers.
Presented to Chang the Clerk on the Fifteenth Night of the Eighth Moon
Filmy clouds from the four quarters;
Heaven has lost its stars;
A clean wind sweeps through space,
moonlight flows in ripples.
On level sands and quiet waters
sound and shadow cease.
I beg you, drink a cup of wine
and sing a song for me.
The notes of your song are harsh,
the words bitter indeed -
My tears run like rain
before I have heard to the end.
Where Tung-t'ing meets the sky
and Chiu-I soars,
Dragon and crocodile rise and vanish,
apes and raccoons yelp.
Nine chances of dying to ten of life
to reach this post,
In rooms so silent and still
as if we had gone into hiding!
We are fearful of snakes when we rise from bed,
of poison when we eat;
Air from the sea clammy and damp,
Its odor rank and musty...
Another day, another encounter in the Twilight Zone. It's from 2006.
the pretty young girl who mooed like a cow
pert,
petite,
dressed for the summer
in halter
and capri pants,
open-eyed alert
and eager with a question
about where she could find
tickets for the Fiesta
oyster-bake
I tried to help
but everyplace I suggested
she had already been
but it was nice talking to her
because she seemed
young
and fresh
and I am not
then she laughed
not at anything I said
but something
she said herself that I didn't hear
but she seemed to think it was great
because she laughed, mouth
wide open, stretched wide open
like she was trying to stretch
the edges of her mouth
from ear to ear -
literally
and she mooed
like a cow in a pasture,
she mooed
ooooooooooooooooooo
then, again,
without taking a breath,
ooooooooooooooooooooo
since I was fourteen years old
something
like this always happens,
every time
I get to talk
to a pretty young girl
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
and it turns into
another encounter
in a Twilight Zone rerun
Next from my library, I have two poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from his book Wild Dreams of a New Beginning. The book was published by New Directions in 1988, combining two previous New Directions editions, Who Are We Now in 1976 and Landscapes of Living & Dying in 1979.
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion light bulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
"Souls eat souls in the general emptiness"
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
"It's all taking place in one mind"
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There's a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gasp
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
sinks with it
The seas come in over Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
and players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly becomes salt
Manhattan Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
as the great wave sweeps Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
Manhattan steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternal night
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes
At The Bodega
The hot young stud flamenco dancer
dressed like a bullfighter
has fast feet like little animals
with their own identities
and a life of their own
having nothing at all to do
with the rest of him
which watches
as they do the dancing
And each insolent gesture
which the body makes
and each arrogant pose
that body takes
exactly like a toreador
telling the woman he whirls around
"I am your master
you cannot touch me
And in the end
I will bring you
to my feet
with this
white handkerchief"
I don't know what you would call this, but it's a pretty fair rant.
the sixth great extinction
Five times in our mother’s history she has spit out the life she nurtured.
The first time was 440 million years ago, so long ago that it was only in the teeming brine that life had arisen, when twenty-five percent of all those living marine families were destroyed
(A biologic family being as many as thousands of species.)
It was the same so very old story, climate change, that brought this reign of death to the new - as geologic time counts - planet.
The seeds were planted for the sixth great extinction about a hundred thousand years ago when the first modern humans began to disperse throughout the world, and everywhere that humans went, death was sure to follow. Large species and small fell to lost primordial memory, from human aggression and disease. The human’s closest cousin, the Neanderthal, after nearly half a million years at home in Europe, lasted less than ten thousand years after the arrival of man.
And those seeds of destruction sprouted about ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture and everywhere that humans farmed the extinction of species accelerated .
Previous extinctions were the usually the result of climate change caused by natural factors, such as plate tectonics movements on a global scale, or massive volcanoes, or meteor impacts.
But for this, the sixth great extinction, our own great extinction, we are the plague that infects, like ever-spreading disease-carrying lice, the entire world around us.
~~~
we are the plague,
builders of the castles
that eat the sand
and dry up the seas
that breaks on its shore
we are the anti-life,
the smiling skull,
the death,
the destroyer-gods
of our Mother’s creation
even as we sit
sipping beer before our television,
the tendrils of our
unintended
malevolence spread
beneath us
even as we love all that we destroy,
even as the end approaches,
we deny our guilt,
never meaning to harm
any of it
it is just our nature,
you know,
for we are death
and death is what we do
so well
Next, from the anthology, I have three short poems by Wang Wei.
Consider what it must be to be one of the three greatest poets in a tradition that stretches over thousands of years.
From My Retreat on the River Wang, for P'ei Ti
The colours of the cold mountain
have turned to emerald;
The autumn river gurgles on
day after day.
Leaning on my staff
before the wicket gate,
I hear the cicadas' chirp
carried on the evening wind.
Beyond the ferry-head
the sun is just setting;
A solitary plume of smoke
rises above the village.
I met you just now, tipsy as Chieh Yu:
How wildly you sang to me - a "Mr. Five-Willows"!
(Mr. Five-Willows, nickname for a famous scholar-poet of a earlier dynasty with whom Wang compares himself.)
Autumn Evening in a Mountain Hut
Rain freshly fallen on the bare mountain;
the air full of autumn in the dusk.
A bright moon peers between the pines;
A clear stream bubbles over the stones.
Clamour in the bamboos -
the washer-girls are returning;
The lotus stirs
and down come the fisher-boats.
Though the sweet grass of spring has withered,
Why not linger here, my prince of friends?
Written on Returning from Mount Sung
A clear stream ribbons through the long moors.
My horse and carriage amble on, clop clop.
the water flows
as if it had a will;
Birds homing at dusk
keep me company.
There are crumbling walls
down by the ancient ford;
The autumn hills
are awash in the sunset.
It was a long descent from the peak of Mount Sung:
On reaching home I shall close my door on the world
The next poem is from 2005. I'm not sure if I used it here recently or if I just thought about using it here recently.
So, either, here it is again or here it is finally.
one day it's like this
it seems you
never recognize
a turn in the road
until you've passed it
one day
it's like this
and the next
like that
and for a while
it seems like
nothing has changed
but then you begin
to notice things
sighs that come
like a quick wind
through the trees
here
then gone
unpredicted
by the quiet still
before and after
or a drifting of
attention
when you talk
a cheek poised
instead of lips
for a kiss
good-bye
then the moment
she says
I want to talk
and your say
about what
and she says
about us
and you say
what about us
and she says
never mind
and you know
the moment's passed
the turn is made
one day it was like this
but now it's like that
and not like this
at all
Next from my library, I have two short poems by my poet-friend Joanna M. Weston. The poems are from her book, A Summer Father, published in 2006 by Frontenac House of Calgary, Alberta.
Joanna grew up on the North Downs of Kent, under one of the main bombing runs to London. She left England at age 18 and became a Canadian citizen in 1965, the same day the maple leaf flag was adopted. She writes poetry, short stories, children's books and poetry reviews. She has published internationally in journals and anthologies and has to middle-readers in print, The Willow-Tree Girl and Those Blue Shoes.
This book is a remembrance of and a tribute to her father, and, in a way, to all the million others killed with him in the Second World War.
A Book called "Poems"
They had no peace at their creation
No twilight hush of wings;
sixty-four pages
worn and creased
with split binding
that traveled
from my childhood
to this present
his words lift
to thud in sunlit sand
and bloody shadows
as Father campaigns
to put gunfire and dead men
on paper
Embarkation
Only a few officials holding watches
Noted the stealthy hour of our departing,
And, as we went, turned back to the hotel.
the train moves slowly
form the station
Father goes without goodbye
into the soldier's comradeship
of linked solitudes
pistons heave, wheels draw them
down the track, out of dawn
to quayside and a somber song
that whispers and lifts
like smoke
war lies
ahead of the bow wave
beyond foam sliding past the ship's hull
beyond arcs of flying fish
out of sight
unimagined
It's kind of obvious, but the thought occurred to me so I though I'd write a poem about it.
the cutting room floor
memory like movies,
not linear, but scene by scene
passing
I remember
looking at a reflection
of myself in a store window
in Houston, January 10, 1966,
waiting for induction
and a bus ride
to basic training in San Antonio,
recognizing the image
in the window
as the last time would I see myself as a civilian
for some years to come…
I don’t remember
taking the oath or getting
on the bus or the several hours
on the bus, but I remember getting off
in San Antonio, lining up
with a scruffy collection of recently former civilians,
greeted, not gently,
by a North Carolina accented Drill Instructor
I remember him tall and thin, intense eyes
under the brim of a hat pulled
low and I remember my new name,
“big’un” he called me, and “big’un” I was
for the next nine weeks…
I remember a ragged march
to our barracks, but nothing else
that day; I remember standing in cold
January rain the next morning, very early,
for breakfast, but I don’t remember breakfast;
I remember standing in line
for haircuts, the shearing of our last civilian vanity,
but I don’t remember the actual cutting;
I remember standing in line to get uniforms,
fatigues in olive drab, khaki 1505s, and dress blues,
a wool overcoat fit for arctic weather, a fatigue coat
my son took to college, a raincoat I still wear
when it rains, a fatigue cap, a cunt cap, a dress hat
to wear with dress blues, but I don't remember
boots, I don't remember socks,
I don't remember shoes...
I remember marching,
everywhere marching, but I don’t remember
where we went; I remember
smoke breaks, “smoke’um if you got’um,”
crumpled cigarettes
pulled from crumpled packages
carried in our socks;
I remember guarding our passage, running ahead
at every street crossing, standing in the intersection
at parade-rest, one arm extended, open palm,
stopping oncoming traffic for our flight to pass (each group
of recruits called a “flight”); but
I don’t remember what crossing guards
like me were called, except that it was something
that sounded much more special than “crossing guard”
I remember running the obstacle course at the end of training,
severe shin splints making a difficult run,
but I remember none of it but the pain
and the Drill Instructor at the end of the course
giving me a thumbs up as I passed;
and I remember, as squad leader, marching my squad
to the parade field for our final graduation
pass before the base commander,
but I don’t
remember marching that final 100 yards
across the field…
I remember the meningitis scare after training,
quarantine,
sleeping January nights in the barracks
with all the windows open;
I remember making three friends during that isolation,
one now dead,
the other two long since lost to the maw of time passing…
out of nine weeks of living,
I remember maybe as much as half a day,
the rest lost to the cutting floor, like all the slow parts
of the run-of-the-mill movie
that has been my life so far, and, as the movie
flickers on to its final hour,
more of it ends on the floor, less and
less of it ever to be seen on the screen
of memory…
just another plain-vanilla “Flubber” of a movie passing,
lucky to ever gross
it’s cost
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