flahute

FOUR MOUNTAIN POSTURES

Walking in the mountains
unconsciously trudging along
grab a vine
climb another ridge

Lying in the mountains
pine wind enters the ears
for no good reason
beautiful dreams are blown apart

  — Stonehouse [Shih Wu] (1272 – 1352), Chinese monk and poet. Translation by Red Pine.

WORDS AND THE DIMINUTION OF ALL THINGS

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.

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.

  — Charles Wright (b. 1935), American poet.

NOVEMBER NIGHT

Listen. . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

  — Adelaide Crapsey

IT IS THE TIME OF RAIN AND SNOW

It is the time of rain and snow
I spend sleepless nights
And watch the frost
Frail as your love
Gathers in the dawn.

  — Izumi Shikibu, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

AUTUMN

Both lying on our sides, making love in
spoon position when she’s startled, What’s that?
She means the enormous ship passing before you—
maybe not that large, is it a freighter

or a passenger ship? But it seems huge in the dark
and it’s so close. That’s a poem you say, D. H.
Lawrence—Have you built your ship of death,
have you? O build your ship of death,

For you will need it. Right here it would be good
if there were a small orchestra on board, you’d hear
them and say to her, That piece is called Autumn

that’s what the brave musicians played as the Titanic
went under—and then you could name this poem “Autumn.”
But no, the ship is silent, its white lights glow in the darkness.

  — Richard Garcia

WHEN AUTUMN CAME

This is the way that autumn came to the trees:
it stripped them down to the skin,
left their ebony bodies naked.
It shook out their hearts, the yellow leaves,
scattered them over the ground.
Anyone could trample them out of shape
undisturbed by a single moan of protest.

The birds that herald dreams
were exiled from their song,
each voice torn out of its throat.
They dropped into the dust
even before the hunter strung his bow.

Oh, God of May have mercy.
Bless these withered bodies
with the passion of your resurrection;
make their dead veins flow with blood again.

Give some tree the gift of green again.
Let one bird sing.

  — Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911 – 1984), Indian/Pakistani poet.

LEAVES

1

Every October it becomes important, no, necessary
to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded
by leaves turning; it’s not just the symbolism,
to confront in the death of the year your death,
one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony
isn’t lost on you that nature is most seductive
when it’s about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its
incipient exit, an ending that at least so far
the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)
have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe
is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception
because of course nature is always renewing itself—
         the trees don’t die, they just pretend,
         go out in style, and return in style: a new style.

2

Is it deliberate how far they make you go
especially if you live in the city to get far
enough away from home to see not just trees
but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high
speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were
in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:
so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks
like rain, or snow, but it’s probably just clouds
(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder,
given the poverty of your memory, which road had the
most color last year, but it doesn’t matter since
you’re probably too late anyway, or too early—
         whichever road you take will be the wrong one
         and you’ve probably come all this way for nothing.

3

You’ll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won’t last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You’re on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won’t last, you don’t want it to last. You
can’t stand any more. But you don’t want it to stop.
It’s what you’ve come for. It’s what you’ll
come back for. It won’t stay with you, but you’ll
         remember that it felt like nothing else you’ve felt
         or something you’ve felt that also didn’t last.

  — Lloyd Schwartz (b. 1941), American poet.

MAY DAY

I’ve decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk on
The light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a love note was hidden,

Be a cell where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I’ve decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn’t matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I’ve decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.

  — Phillis Levin, American poet and professor.

STILL ON WATER

Solitude closes down around us
As we lie passive and exhausted
Solitude clamps us softly in its warm hand.

A white bird breaks from the rushes
And flies away, and the boat rocks
Drunkenly in the billows
of your nude jubilation.

  — Kenneth Rexroth (1905 – 1982), American Beat poet and translator