An Old Translation Lost and a New One Found

This afternoon I came across an image on Twitter ( a photo by @maryfrancesness) and it brought to mind one of my favorite Wang Wei poems.  I looked and I looked but I couldn't find my old translation of the poem - it was one of the first Tang poems I ever remember translating.  Simple as it is, it captures much of the ethos of Tang poetry - it's as much a meditation as it is a poem, a moment of solitary reflection that is preserved for posterity in four lines of verse. So really it is a shared meditation, shared that is between writer and reader in a simple and intimate way -- here's what I saw in the mountains one day.  It's such a short beautiful poem, I figured why not translate it again, and here's the result together with the photo that sparked my recollection.

Deer Park (by Wang Wei)

An empty mountainside

No one to be seen

But the echo of voices resounds

Sunlight reaches deep into the woods

Again the green moss glistens

鹿柴 (王维)

空山不见人

但闻人语响

返景入深林

复照青苔上

And here is the poem that I tweeted in reply to @maryfrancesness and in homage to the great Wang Wei:

On a sheer face of stone
Where none can be seen
Deep inside a crevasse
A green sward glistens

  

The Dream of Jacob's Ladder

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And then the angel of presence

Uriel through a loophole

Fell to the lower bounds

Where long she dwelled

Unconscious

All feeling and no thought

Flowed through her veins

But when her lips parted

Peradventure

She decanted pure

Honeyed truth

And nothing else

As distilled silence

Covered the world

Completely like a fresh

Fallen blanket of snow

But it was Jacob

Who couldn’t leave

Well enough alone

Bothered by all the silence

He trampled on it

Proclaiming loudly

I am the firstborn

Of every creature which God

Has ever endowed with life

Truly the only chosen one

A man seeing God is far better

Than merely abiding

Sightless in the presence

Henceforth unceasing controversy

Eventually did come

Perpetual clamor and strife

As they wrestled

All night long and in truth

Nobody ever really won

And soon they altogether

Forgot about the ladder

On which they had been standing

One rung after another had unbecome

Until the dream itself was undone

The Trees of Winter

Most of all I too

Love the trees of winter

Far more articulate than

Those of spring summer or fall

They speak directly to the sky

Without adornment

Like brain folds or sea coral 

They make clear their adherence

To a fixed set of rules 

For continuous growth

With scienter of life and

Precise enough in their branching

To make a Fortran coder blush

(Not sure but I think this great image is by the South African artist William Kentridge)

Night Storm

Nothing reared its head
Unnerved and encumbered
Self more fictive than real
From time dispatched
The bedsheets sundered
Stripped of all pretense
Like a dog indulging in
A disconsolate whimper
Amidst the ongoing thunder

Live Blogging - A Winter Afternoon, Thinking about Spring

We are much like trees
Our center lies in the past
Quite literally
And the longer we live
The present becomes
By far the least of us

But when we admit to ourselves
Life is nothing but a process
We are that much closer to thinking
And living like a great elm or mighty beech
A photosynthetic machine
If ever there was one

Just do one thing
And keep doing it
Extremely well
Write that song
Paint that painting
Keep that vow
And somehow
Someday you
Just might end up
Ready to attain
A vast fullness in bloom

Poem for @Maryfrancesness

For she who possesses acuity

Sees each of the Buddha's 3,000 realms

Etched clearly on

The face of stone

A codex of infinite possibility

Composed solely

Of the sedimentary layers

And splayed flecks

Of granite and mica

Thereon exposed

And while I'm at it, here's another poem that started out as a tweet I sent to @maryfrancesness:

Stepping over
The interstitial worlds
That emerge between
The sidewalk cracks
Uncompressed
You feel the allure
Of falling deep into
That greenest place
Although you
Full well know
That once you are
There would be
No route back

For Marissa - New Year's Eve/New Year's Day

If you were to break glitter down
To the subatomic level
Do you think it would
Still shimmer all the way
To the bottom rung of
The ladder of visible light?

Of course it would!
The quantity of pixie dust
Is not strained
But is distributed
Roughly in equal measure
All through the universe
Which seems to consist
Of one particle glitter
For every million of grit

With certain exceptions
For pooling and puddling
Here and there
Yet even so
Wherever we see it gathering
In greater concentration
There we can infer
Lies the growing tip of
The homunculus rising
The very sparkle of life

All that glitters is not gold
Yet still it may hold far
Greater intrinsic worth
Than all the fool's gold
Locked away in the vaults
Across the vast glittering earth