Flower's shadow.

 

To wait for the moon

I am sitting in the western parlour,

To greet the wind

I have left the door ajar,

When a flower's shadow stirred

and brushed the wall,

For a moment I thought

It is the shadow of a lover coming.

 

(Yuan Chen, AD 799-831)



A walk.

 

My eyes already touch the sunny hills,

Going far ahead from the roads where I have begun,

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasped,

It has inner light, even from a distance,

 

And charges us, even if we do not reach it

into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

We already are, a gesture waves us on

Answering our own wave,

But what we feel is the wind in our faces.

 

(Rainer Maria Rielke)



The day is gone.

 

When the blue shadows

Pull themselves across the hills

And white sinks to the twilight

The blue snow of twilight

There's an illution of beginning

Here, where the field intersects the sky

Beyond the fence

Where the crystals slowly scurry

from the hills

It is a foreign house

There's nothing to unpack

It is not yet night

And the day with it's silence

Refused to talk

The day is gone

It is a blessing

Let it be a blessing.

 

(from, feminine winter cold, Sarah Mclay)



Rain.

(drawing, after Bansky's mural, Buenos Aires)

 

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,

Not attentive, not distracted,

Light footsteps, thin drizzles,

Water that is air, air that is time,

The day is still leaving,

The night has yet to arrive,

Figurations of mist,

At the turn of the corner,

Figuration of time,

At the bend of this pause.

 

Air and water, words with no weight,

What we are and are,

The days and years this moment,

Weightless time and heavy sorrow,

The years go by, the moments return.

In another time that is now,

Listen to the footsteps of time,

A restless garden adrift- go in

Your shadow covers this page.

 

(From; as one listens to the rain, Octavio Paz)



As far as memory.

drawing after Wang Zhi Jie.

 

I am as far as the deepest sky between clouds,

And you are as far as the deepest root and wound,

And I am as far as train at evening,

As far as whistle you can't hear or remember,

I am as far as the sleep of rivers

That stains the deepest sky between clouds,

You are as far as  invention,

And I am as far as memory,

 

I am as far as an infinite alphabet,

Made from yellow stars and ice,

And you are as far as sailor can see midnight,

When he's drunk and the moon is an empty cup,

You are as far as  invention,

And I am as far as  memory,

 

I am as far as the corners of a room,

Where no one has ever spoken,

As far as the lost four corners of the earth,

And you are as far as the space

between word and words,

As far as this room,

Where no words have been spoken,

You are as far as  invention,

And I am as far as  memory.

 

(From; Yellow stars and ice, Susan Stewart)

 

 



Black anemones.

 

Mother, you watch me sleep

and your life is a large tapestry of all colors

of all the most ancient murmurs

knot after twin knots

root after root of story

You don't know how fearful

your beauty as I asleep

your hair is the moon of sea sung in silence

you walk with silver lions

and wait to estrange me

deep in the rug covered with sorrow

embroidered by you in a fierce symetry

binding in a thread of persian silk

the pine trees and the griffins

you called me blind

you touched my eyes

with black anemones

I am a spider that keeps spinning

from the pool in my womb

weaving through eyes

the dew of flames on the web.

 

(Agueda Pizarro)



Evening.

 

Water's color at dusk still white

Sunsets glow in the dark gradually

Windy flowers shake like broken fan

Wave moon stirs like strings of jewels

Ducks sleeping not alone

Crickets chirping repeatedly one after another

 announcing night,

Returning steps still hesitate.

 

(Po Chu-i AD 835)