small stone (160)

Night-train whistle and a cricket’s sharp creak under the floor: sleep’s on a steady approach, punctuated by such music as this.

cold mountain (63)

someone speaks and they all look down

Yesterday it rained, a sudden downpour that flooded the library basement, the entryways to the dormitories; and my pants were soaked to the knee in the three minutes it took me to walk across campus. I took refuge indoors and sat in an armchair by the windows, reading, reading, until the furious patter slowed then stopped. I packed up my books, wound up my umbrella. I stepped outside into the half-light, and they were there: flocks of sparrows on the sidewalks and in the trees. I can’t remember if I heard them first, or saw them first, but there they dashed and scattered with a chorus of tiny music. Once I noticed them I couldn’t stop looking for them, hoping another one would come nearer me than the last, and perhaps gift me her lightness of wing and gracious, simple song.

small stone (159)

The carillon clangs out over the damp, chill lawns. Sparrows, ever-cheerful, drink from sidewalk puddles.

cold mountain (62)

I don’t understand you, Han Shan. You pull up your nose in disdain at “worldly life,” then you spend half your poems bemoaning intrigues at court, sniffing at the state of affairs, and criticizing officials. You’re like a man who assures his host he doesn’t drink, but then spends the entire party eyeing the drinks in others’ hands. Also: your landscapes are vacant, flat caricature. For you, the mountains and oceans seem to exist simply as motifs or symbols. I can’t see that you explored them on their terms, before you borrowed them over to stand in for truth or suffering or whatever else. The world empties of complexity and richness in your poems. Every person or event or thing is either this or that, virtuous or not, with Heaven or against Heaven, approved or disapproved. I’ll tell you honestly, Han Shan, sometimes I regret getting involved with you. The black-and-white judgement you’ve laid down saddens me and makes me brittle and irritable: how aware I am of your heavy hand over the centuries, casting us aside with a dramatic sniff.

small stone (158)

A morning dark as dusk. Storefronts spilling light are intimate to us, little electric dawns. We congregate along their horizons, blinking.

small stone (157)

Night windows open up interiors to passer-by like a stage-whisper: “Don’t look here!”

cold mountain (61)

as long as bones are rare

Bleached edge of a gull’s wing, dull sidewalks
empty in the morning, pale
silt dunes inscribed by winds,

each thing essential, when it leapt
like a sliver from the spar
and struck me,
rare, singular, unattainable, but:
here

a page or screen, white, open frame
to which we bind our inky tendons,
find flesh for thought—

small stone (156)

Graylit morning. Leaves swirl in streets vacant of the sun. Passer-by have pinched, anxious looks and move with heavy, determined steps.

cold mountain (60)

with paper pants and tiles for shorts
dying of hunger and cold in the end

Your farmer and I coincide in our dark thoughts: in the midst of abundance he imagines the worst, the stores depleted, the family in ruins, and in the middle of the season of my freedom I imagine a devastating loss of independence, the heart’s penury. A room of my own has obsessed me for years, as I lived without both physically and imaginatively. Now here I am, sitting with homework and a coffee. Here I am, walking across the Green with a book. Here I am, striding down the hill from a lecture in the cool evening to go back to a small room and do what needs doing in my world. This is contentment, this is joy. Even so, there is the anxiety of living, the economy of it. It’s difficult to try and stay out here on my own, easy to go back and trade in both independence and worries for a safety net. Then I thought about the translation offer in my email today, which is drudgery of its own kind, exactly the kind of work I was going to avoid this year, except that if I want this room of my own—this university, this city, this country, this paradise gathered between my small hands—I need work of some kind to keep it so, or else I’ll find myself running back to the terrible safety I struggled to break from. I saw the terror through to the end, the shuttering of the city, the closing of this paradise, saw it collapse into a ruin of petty schedules and the brown cacophony of the inconsequential, a door that never shut on distraction and myself disintegrating uselessly into it all. I felt the death of afternoons spent lonely and happy and the taste of an apple eaten walking down the autumn-brilliant street and I can’t stand the thought of it… Like a wedge, this ridiculous business offer, like a wedge in the door already slamming shut in my mind, to prop open the sky a little. I’m talking nonsense, I know. It’s only the nerve-rattled dream-talk of a woman who sees what life is at stake, like a farmer imagining locusts when the crop is nearly ready for harvest.

small stone (155)

Heads whip left & right at the crosswalks, and the flags snap to & fro above the street. Eyes closed, the wind’s roar deafens even traffic.