Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.
(Sung Landscape Poetry [CE 960-1127] translated by Amitendranath Tagore))
Mei Yao-ch’en - A Walk on Lu-shan Mountain
My longing for wilderness is satisfied.
Mountains all around, high and low.
There is variety in these wonderful peaks:
I walk alone and lose myself in the dark path.
Hoar frost falls and bears climb the trees.
An empty wood; deer drink from the stream.
Where do the people dwell?
A cock crows once from beyond the clouds.
Ou-yang Hsiu - Climbing the Center Peak of T’ai-shih Mountain
I tether my horse in the shadow of green pines:
In my straw sandals I walk along the green cliff.
Startled birds stir the forest flowers;
Empty hills echo the human voice.
Glow of clouds penetrating the dark mist
Is beyond my power to capture.
Su Shih - Climbing Yum-lung Mountain
Drunk, I walk along the Huang-mao cliff;
The whole cliff is strewn with boulders like flocks of sheep.
I scramble to the edge of the cliff by the stone seat;
Looking up I see white clouds filling the sky.
The sound of songs fall into the ravine, the autumn wind blows sharply.
The men on the path lift their heads and look towards the southeast;
Boisterous Shih-chun claps his hands and laughs loudly.
Su Ch’e - Huo-jan Pavilion
The city is in the south, the mountains in the north;
Every time I come here my spirit expands.
Blue tiles on a thousand houses freshly washed in rain;
Green pines in myriad gullies, fog just rising.
Throughout autumn I was ill in bed,
Listening to the sound of axes.
Today we ascend to the pavilion carrying our wine;
I request all of you to compose beautiful verses.
Allow me first to write this poem on the pavilion wall.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
People bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me: wag.
Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master.
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
Once there were songs for everything,
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you —
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem,
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It’s not easy to now what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
Hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—Who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
so will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
Translated from the Swedish by Gunnar Harding and Frederic Will
I wake my car.
Its windshield is covered with pollen.
I put on my sunglasses
and the song of the birds darkens.
While another man buys a newspaper
in the railroad station
near a large goods wagon
which is entirely red with rust
and stands flickering in the sun.
No emptiness anywhere here.
Straight across the spring warmth a cold corridor
where someone comes hurrying
to say that they are slandering him
all the way up to the Director.
Through a backdoor in the landscape
comes the magpie
black and white, Hel’s bird.
And the blackbird moving crisscross
until everything becomes a charcoal drawing,
except for the white sheets on the clothesline:
a Palestrina choir.
No emptiness anywhere here.
Fantastic to feel how my poem grows
while I myself shrink.
It is growing, it takes my place.
It pushes me out of its way.
It throws me out of the nest.
The poem is ready.
In March I dreamed of mud,
sheets of mud over the ballroom chairs and table.
rainbow slicks of mud under the throne.
In April I saw mud of clouds and mud of sun.
Now in May I find excuses to linger in the kitchen
for wafts of silt and ale,
cinnamon and river bottom,
tender scallion and sour underlog.
At night I cannot sleep.
I am listening for the dribble of mud
climbing the stairs to our bedroom
as if a child in a wet bathing suit ran
up them in the dark.
Last night I said, “Face it, you’re bored.
How many times can you live over
with the same excitement
that moment when the princess leans
into the well, her face a petal
falling to the surface of the water
as you rise like a bubble to her lips,
the golden ball bursting from your mouth?”
Remember how she hurled you against the wall,
your body cracking open,
skin shriveling to the bone,
the green pod of your heart splitting in two,
and her face imprinted with every moment
of your transformation?
I no longer tremble.
Night after night I lie beside her.
“Why is your forehead so cool and damp?” she asks.
Her breasts are soft and dry as flour.
The hand that brushes my head is feverish.
At her touch I long for wet leaves,
the slap of water against rocks.
“What are you thinking of” she asks.
How can I tell her
I am thinking the green skin
shoved like wet pants behind the Directoire desk?
Or tell her I am mortgaged to the hilt
of my sword, io the leek-green tip of my soul?
Someday I will drag her by her hair
to the river—and what? Drown her?
Show her the green flame of my self rising at her feet?
But here’s no more violence in her
than in a fence or a gate.
“What are you thinking of?” she whispers.
I am staring into the garden.
I am watching the moon
wind its trail of golden slime around the oak,
over the stone basin of the fountain.
How can I tell her
I am thinking that transformations are not forever?
Translated from the Italian by George Kay
Bring me the sunflower for me to transplant
to my own ground burnt by the spray of sea,
and show all day to the imaging blues
of sky that golden-faced anxiety.
Things hid in darkness lean towards the clear,
bodies consume themselves in a flowing
of shades: and they in varied music—showing
the chance of chances is to disappear.
So bring me the plant that takes you right
where the blond hazes shimmering rise
and life fumes to air as spirit does;
bring me the sunflower crazy with the light.
When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.
I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.
If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out “I am
an Orphan.”
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
Translated from the Latin by David Ferry
See Mount Soracte shining in the snow.
See how the laboring overladen trees
Can scarcely bear their burdens any longer.
See how the streams are frozen in the cold.
Bring in the wood and light the fire and open
The fourth-year vintage wine in the Sabine jars,
O Thaliarchus, as for everything else,
Forget tomorrow. Leave it up to the gods.
Once the gods have decided, the winds at sea
Will quiet down, and the sea will quiet down,
And these cypresses and old ash trees will shake
In the storm no longer. Take everything as it comes.
Put down your books for profit every new day
That Fortune allows you to have. While you’re still young,
And while morose old age is far away,
There’s love, there are parties, there’s dancing and there’s music,
There are young people out in the city squares together
As evening comes on, there are whispers of lovers, there’s laughter.
is in her step such grace
goes in the movement of her
arms & shoulders as she walks
such grace in how she holds
her head how graceful the
gestures of her hands such
grace in the way she slightly
tilts her face toward me when
a smile is beginning there
and float in air of a dan-cer
suspended flight of a
hummingbird always she goes
in grace there is such
grace in all her going.
Stand tall, no matter your heights, how dark your skin
Your spirit is all colors within
You are made of the finest woven light
From the iridescent love that formed your mothers, fathers
Your grandparents all the way back on the spiral road----
There is no end to this love
It has formed your bodies
Feeds your bright spirits
And no metter what happens in these times of breaking----
No matter dictators, the heartless, and liars
No matter----you are born of those
Who kept ceremonial embers burning in their hands
All through the miles of relntless exile
Those who sang the path through massacre
All the way to sunrise
You will make it through----
.
The first thing that is apt to raise your eyes
Above the dove-grey and silvery thickets
Of lupine and coyote bush and artichoke thistle
On the sandy, winding path from the parking lot
To the beach at Abbott’s Lagoon is the white flash
Of the marsh hawk’s rump as it skims low
Over the coastal scrub. White-crowned sparrows,
Loud in the lupine even in October, even
In the drizzly rain, startle and disappear.
The brush rabbits freeze, then bolt and disappear,
And the burbling songs and clucks of the quail
That you may not even have noticed you were noticing
Go mute and you are there in October and the rain,
And the hawk soars past, first hawk, then shadow
Of a hawk, not much shadow in the rain, low sun
Silvering through clouds a little to the west.
It’s almost sundown. And this is the new weather
At the beginning of the middle of the California fall
When a rain puts an end to the long sweet days
Of our September when the skies are clear, days mild,
and the roots of the plants have gripped down
Into the five-or six-month drought, have licked
All the moisture they are going to lick
From the summer fogs, and it is very good to be walking
Because you can almost hear the earth sigh
As it sucks up the rain, here where mid-October
Is the beginning of winter which is the beginning
Of a spring greening, as if the sound you are hearing
Is spring and winter lying down in one another’s arms
Under the hawk’s shadow among the coastal scrub,
Ocean in the distance and the faintest sound of surf
and a few egrets, bright whits, working the reeds
At the water’s edge in October in the rain.
