Forever Across the Waters

This is posted, in part, in honour of a friend, a lover of ancient China who is now ill. There are other reasons -- of course there are. Why choose one poem over another? Why a Western observer of Chinese poets, rather than a Chinese poet? Why a piece that dwells in a tangle of strands of time?

Too many forms of why. Let the poem speak.

Of Distress Being Humiliated by the Classical Chinese Poets
Hayden Carruth

Masters, the mock orange is blooming in Syracuse without
scent, having been bred by patient horticulturalists
To make this greater display at the expense of fragrance.
But I miss the jasmine of my back-country home.
Your language has no tenses, which is why your poems can
never be translated whole into English;
Your minds are the minds of men who feel and imagine
without time.
The serenity of the present, the repose of my eyes in the cool
whiteness of sterile flowers.
Even now the headsman with his great curved blade and rank
odor is stalking the byways for some of you.
When everything happens at once, no conflicts can occur.
Reality is an impasse. Tell me again
How the white heron rises from among the reeds and flies
forever across the nacreous river at twilight
Toward the distant islands.