To My Own Devices (by Li Bai)

Facing the jug

Oblivious to the night

How the petals have fallen

To fill up my gown

Drunken I rise

And stumble towards

The light of the moon upstream

With the birds so far away

And people so few

And far between

自遣

李白

对酒不觉暝

落花盈我衣

醉起步溪月

鸟还人亦稀

*******

Addendum: Counting the Blossoms

Last night

Sitting up late

Drinking red wine

With Li Bai

This morning looking

At the lawn hungover
I wondered just how

Many petals it took
To fill up his gown

The Moon Amidst a Brocade

Half an hour before sunset Against a backdrop Teal trending to gray The moon appeared As a cloud among equals Part of the cumulus brocade Draped across the sky

Living in Metaphor (part 1)

Last night walking my dog into town I had this strange sense of passing through a Hollywood movie lot.  The façade of the storefronts seemed to be just that, as if the small town where I live had contracted further still by losing a dimension.  Just beyond the storefronts, I could sense, lay another world, another plane of reality quite different from what presents itself along Main Street here in Mayberry RFD. In truth, only a few hundred feet behind the storefronts, the gravel lots give way to pasture overrun with weeds.

So much of what we know of the world we learn from the various media we consume.  Our sense of what’s real and what’s not is itself entirely constructed by the thousands of books, movies and TV shows that flit before our eyes.  Common sense tells us there’s a difference between stage and reality when in truth there’s not all that much because our sense of both has been similarly contrived by the very same means.  All the world being a stage is no mere figure of speech but a metaphor that conveys an extremely radical and much deeper meaning about the experience of being human.  How like players on the stage we are never quite ourselves yet always hungering for more love and applause.

In a Weedy Patch

This afternoon in the backyard, clearing up a weedy patch along the property line, I was struck by how much of a weed actually grows underground – not just the root, as you would normally expect to be the case, but growing there, intermixed with the dirt, if not quite inextricably bound up with it, I also found a proliferation of the weeds’ green stems and leaves, only just now having been exposed to the light of day – as if the entire plant had been slumbering, already completely formed underground, waiting for the chance to push itself up into daylight. 

In those worlds just out of our view and ken – whether underground or part of our subconscious mind – reality proliferates to a far greater extent than we otherwise imagine possible.  Underground, the unconscious, the womb of time -- take your pick from these metaphors that each describe a similarly fecund but not quite accessible place.

A Song for Huang Bo

It's a dream of the absurd

Enlightenment is bewilderment

And it begins right here

Unsullied by thoughts or words

Truth emoted freely

A song of the womb

A song for Huang Bo

Or someone else's poem

Remotely overheard

Oh yeah you see

I never had control

Not-me it seems

Is who I was before

I went to school

Now unlearned I'm free

Like a dog off the leash

That takes the long way home

The streets look familiar

But somehow rearranged

Not good not bad

Just part of this pure land

Part of this ineluctable prior

Reference frame

From New Songs, Smash Hits by Brad Melamed

The Past That's Present Still ( a lament for twilight in the garden)

Has there ever been A more perfect spring day Than this? I mean while
The climate is heading us
To wrack and ruin and
We will have a constitutional Crisis upon our hands soon The tulips and daffodils Are dancing sublimely In the late afternoon sun
The way things were is passing
Right before our eyes but
(if only for a little while) it
Keeps offering us a showcase
Of staggering beauty

The Path of Apology

How would it feel to walk by
Your younger self
Without so much
As a hint of recognition
Notwithstanding
The many scars given
And received
To be granted
Such new lease on life
That is the power
Of the path of Apology
And forgiveness