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The Jewel Stairs Grievance By Li Po Translated by Ezra Pound The Jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn. In My Medicine CabinetBY Jack Kerouac In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age The Bottoms of My ShoesBy Jack Kerouac The bottoms of my shoes are clean From walking in the rain Useless! Useless!By Jack Kerouac Useless! Useless! —heavy rain driving into the sea Kyoto: MarchBy Gary Snyder A few light flakes of snow Fall in the feeble sun; Birds sing in the cold, A warbler by the wall. The plum Buds tight and chill soon bloom. The moon begins first Fourth, a faint slice west At nightfall. Jupiter half-way High at the end of night- Meditation. The dove cry Twangs like a bow. At dawn Mt. Hiei dusted white On top; in the clear air Folds of all the gullied green Hills around the town are sharp, Breath stings. Beneath the roofs Of frosty houses Lovers part, from tangle warm Of gentle bodies under quilt And crack the icy water to the face And wake and feed the children And grandchildren that they love Sitting Outside at the End of AutumnBy Charles Wright Three years ago, in the afternoons, I used to sit back here and try To answer the simple arithmetic of my life, But never could figure it— This object and that object Never contained the landscape nor all of its implications, This tree and that shrub Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient I took from or carried to, nor do they do so now, Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate, Looking to see what adds up. Everything comes from something, only something comes from nothing, Lao Tzu says, more or less. Eminently sensible, I say, Rubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers. Delicate as an earring, it carries its emptiness like a child It would be rid of. I rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything Resplendent in its vocabulary or disguise— But one and one make nothing, he adds, endless and everywhere, The shadow that everything casts. Two Views of BusonBy Robert Hass 1 A French scholar says he affected the Chinese manner. When he took his friends into the countryside To look at blossoms, they all saw Chinese blossoms. He dressed accordingly and wept for the wild geese of Shosho. 2 One year after making love through the short midsummer night He walked home at dawn and noticed that the river Oi Had sunk two feet. The following year was better. He saw bubbles of crab-froth among the river reeds. The Wild Geese By W. S. Merwin It was always for the animals that I grieved most for the animals I had seen and for those I had only heard of or dreamed about or seen in cages or lying beside the road for those forgotten and those long remembered for the lost ones that were never found again among people there were words we all knew even if we did not say them and although they were always inadequate when we said them they were there if we wanted them when the time came with the animals always there was only presence as long as it was present and then only absence suddenly and no word for it in all the great written wisdom of China where are the animals when were they lost where are the ancestors who knew the way without them all the wise words are bits of sand twitching on the dunes where the forests once whispered in their echoing ancient tongue and the animals knew their way among the trees only in the old poems does their presence survive the gibbons call from mountain gorges the old words all deepen the great absence the vastness of all that has been lost it is still there when the poet in exile looks up long ago hearing the voices of wild geese far above him flying home 微信号：wgsgjx |
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