Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay windannounces autumn, and the equinoxrolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.
Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,looking for friendship or an old love's sleeveor writing letters to his children, lost,and to his children's children, and to us.
What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?
Say that it changed, for better or for worse,sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silka slant of witch-light; on the pure texta slant of genius; emptying mind and heartfor winecups and more winecups and more words.
What was his time?
Say that it was a change,but constant as a changing thing may be,from chicory's moon-dark blue down the taut scaleto chicory's tenderest pink, in a pink fieldsuch as imagination dreams of thought.
But of the heart beneath the winecup moonthe tears that fell beneath the winecup moonfor children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends,what can we say but that it never ends?
Even for us it never ends, only begins.
Yet to spell down the poem on her page,margining her phrases, parsing forththe sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scalefrom chicory pink to blue, is to
Li Po himself: as he before assumedthe poets and the sages who were his.
Like him, we too have eaten of the word:with him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge:and write, in rain, a letter to lost children,a letter long as time and brief as love.
II And yet not love, not only love.
Not caritasor only that.
Nor the pink chicory love,deep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue,in which the dragon of his meaning flewfor friends or children lost, or evenfor the beloved horse, for Li Po's horse:not these, in the self's circle so embraced:too near, too dear, for pure assessment: no,a letter crammed and creviced, crannied full,storied and stored as the ripe honeycombwith other faith than this.
As of sole prideand holy loneliness, the intrinsic faceworn by the always changing shape betweenend and beginning, birth and death.
How moves that line of daring on the map?
Where was it yesterday, or where this morningwhen thunder struck at seven, and in the baythe meteor made its dive, and shed its wings,and with them one more Icarus?
Where struckthat lightning-stroke which in your sleep you sawwrinkling across the eyelid?
Somewhere else?
But somewhere else is always here and now.
Each moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid:each moment you must die.
It was a treethat this time died for you: it was a rockand with it all its local web of love:a chimney, spilling down historic bricks:perhaps a skyful of Ben Franklin's kites.
And with them, us.
For we must hear and bearthe news from everywhere: the hourly news,infinitesimal or vast, from everywhere.
II Sole pride and loneliness: it is the statethe kingdom rather of all things: we hearnews of the heart in weather of the Bear,slide down the rungs of Cassiopeia's Chair,still on the nursery floor, the Milky Way;and, if we question one, must question all.
What is this ‘man'?
How far from him is ‘me'?
Who, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea?
We are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree,among the leaves we are the hidden bird,we are the singer and are what is heard.
What is this ‘world'?
Not Li Po's Gorge alone,and yet, this too might be. ‘The wind was highnorth of the White King City, by the fieldsof whistling barley under cuckoo sky,'where, as the silkworm drew her silk,
Li Pospun out his thoughts of us. ‘Endless as silk'(he said) ‘these poems for lost loves, and us,'and, ‘for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.'Here is the divine loneliness in whichwe greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word,the smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a facetouched, and loved, but still unknown, and thena body, still mysterious in embrace.
Taste lost as touch is lost, only to leavedust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve:and yet, for the inadmissible, to grieve.
Of leaf and love, at last, only to doubt:from world within or world without, kept out. IV Caucus of robins on an alien shoreas of the Ho-Ho birds at Jewel Gatesouthward bound and who knows where and never lateor lost in a roar at sea.
Rovers of chaoseach one the ‘Rover of Chao,' whose slight bonesshall put to shame the swords.
We fly with these,have always flown, and theystay with us here, stand still and stay,while, exiled in the Land of Pa,
Li Postill at the Wine Spring stoops to drink the moon.
And northward now, for fall gives way to spring,from Sandy Hook and Kitty Hawk they wing,and he remembers, with the pipes and flutes,drunk with joy, bewildered by the chancethat brought a friend, and friendship, how, in vain,he strove to speak, ‘and in long sentences,' his pain.
Exiled are we.
Were exiles born.
The ‘far away,'language of desert, language of ocean, language of sky,as of the unfathomable worlds that liebetween the apple and the eye,these are the only words we learn to say.
Each morning we devour the unknown.
Each daywe find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.
This cornucopia of air!
This very heavenof simple day!
We do not know, can never know,the alphabet to find us entrance there.
So, in the street, we stand and stare,to greet a friend, and shake his hand,yet know him beyond knowledge, like ourselves;ocean unknowable by unknowable sand.
V The locust tree spills sequins of pale goldin spiral nebulae, borne on the Invisibleearthward and deathward, but in change to findthe cycles to new birth, new life.
Li Poallowed his autumn thoughts like these to flow,and, from the Gorge, sends word of Chouang's dream.
Did Chouang dream he was a butterfly?
Or did the butterfly dream Chouang?
If so,why then all things can change, and change again,the sea to brook, the brook to sea, and wefrom man to butterfly; and back to man.
This 'I,' this moving ‘I,' this focal ‘I,'which changes, when it dreams the butterfly,into the thing it dreams of; liquid eyein which the thing takes shape, but from withinas well as from without: this liquid ‘I':how many guises, and disguises, thisnimblest of actors takes, how many namesputs on and off, the costumes worn but once,the player queen, the lover, or the dunce,hero or poet, father or friend,suiting the eloquence to the moment's end;childlike, or bestial; the language of the kisssensual or simple; and the gestures, too,as slight as that with which an empire falls,or a great love's abjured; these feignings, sleights,savants, or saints, or fly-by-nights,the novice in her cell, or wearing tightson the high wire above a hell of lights:what's true in these, or false? which is the ‘I'of 'I's'?
Is it the master of the cadence, whotransforms all things to a hoop of flame, where throughtigers of meaning leap?
And are these true,the language never old and never new,such as the world wears on its wedding day,the something borrowed with something chicory blue?
In every part we play, we play ourselves;even the secret doubt to which we comebeneath the changing shapes of self and thing,yes, even this, at last, if we should calland dare to name it, we would findthe only voice that answers is our own.
We are once more defrauded by the mind.
Defrauded?
No.
It is the alchemy by which we grow.
It is the self becoming word, the wordbecoming world.
And with each part we playwe add to cosmic Sum and cosmic sum.
Who knows but one day we shall find,hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,the square root of the eccentric absolute,and the concentric absolute to come. VI The thousand eyes, the Argus ‘I's' of love,of these it was, in verse, that Li Po wovethe magic cloak for his last going forth,into the Gorge for his adventure north.
What is not seen or said?
The cloak of wordsloves all, says all, sends back the wordwhether from Green Spring, and the yellow bird'that sings unceasing on the banks of Kiang,'or 'from the Green Moss Path, that winds and winds,nine turns for every hundred steps it winds,up the Sword Parapet on the road to Shuh.'‘Dead pinetrees hang head-foremost from the cliff.
The cataract roars downward.
Boulders
Splitting the echoes from the mountain wall.
No voice, save when the nameless birds complain,in stunted trees, female echoing male;or, in the moonlight, the lost cuckoo's cry,piercing the traveller's heart.
Wayfarer from afar,why are you here? what brings you here? why here?'
II Why here.
Nor can we say why here.
The peachtree boughscrapes on the wall at midnight, the west windsculptures the wall of fog that slidesseaward, over the Gulf Stream. The rat comes through the wainscot, brings to his larderthe twinned acorn and chestnut burr.
Our sleeplights for a moment into dream, the eyesturn under eyelids for a scene, a scene,o and the music, too, of landscape lost.
And yet, not lost.
For here savannahs wavecressets of pampas, and the kingfisherbinds all that gold with blue. Why here? why here?
Why does the dream keep only this, just this C?
Yes, as the poem or the music do?
The timelessness of time takes form in rhyme:the lotus and the locust tree rehearsea four-form song, the quatrain of the year:not in the clock's chime only do we hearthe passing of the Now into the past,the passing into future of the Now:hut in the alteration of the boughtime becomes visible, becomes audible,becomes the poem and the music too:time becomes still, time becomes time, in rhyme.
Thus, in the Court of Aloes,
Lady Yangcalled the musicians from the Pear Tree Garden,called for Li Po, in order that the spring,tree-peony spring, might so be made immortal.
Li Po, brought drunk to court, took up his brush,but washed his face among the lilies first,then wrote the song of Lady Flying Swallow:which Hsuang Sung, the emperor, forthwith played,moving quick fingers on a flute of jade.
Who will forget that afternoon?
Still, still,the singer holds his phrase, the rising moonremains unrisen.
Even the fountain's falling bladehangs in the air unbroken, and says:
Wait!
II Text into text, text out of text.
Pretextfor scholars or for scholiasts.
The living wordsprings from the dying, as leaves in springspring from dead leaves, our birth from death.
And all is text, is holy text.
Sheepfold Hillbecomes its name for us, anti yet is stillunnamed, unnamable, a book of treesbefore it was a book for men or sheep,before it was a book for words.
Words, words,for it is scarlet now, and brown, and red,and yellow where the birches have not shed,where, in another week, the rocks will show.
And in this marriage of text and thing how can we knowwhere most the meaning lies?
We climb the hillthrough bullbriar thicket and the wild rose, climbpast poverty-grass and the sweet-scented bayscaring the pheasant from his wall, but can we saythat it is only these, through these, we climb,or through the words, the cadence, and the rhyme?
Chang Hsu, calligrapher of great renown,needed to put but his three cupfuls downto tip his brush with lightning.
On the scroll,wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, the skyopened upon Forever.
Which is which?
The poem?
Or the peachtree in the ditch?
Or is all one?
Yes, all is text, the immortal text,
Sheepfold Hill the poem, the poem Sheepfold Hill,and we,
Li Po, the man who sings, sings as he climbs,transposing rhymes to rocks and rocks to rhymes.
The man who sings.
What is this man who sings?
And finds this dedicated use for breathfor phrase and periphrase of praise betweenthe twin indignities of birth and death?
Li Yung, the master of the epitaph,forgetting about meaning, who himselfhad added 'meaning' to the book of >things,'lies who knows where, himself sans epitaph,his text, too, lost, forever lost… And yet, no,text lost and poet lost, these only flowinto that other text that knows no year.
The peachtree in the poem is still here.
The song is in the peachtree and the ear.
IX The winds of doctrine blow both ways at once.
The wetted finger feels the wind each way,presaging plums from north, and snow from south.
The dust-wind whistles from the eastern seato dry the nectarine and parch the mouth.
The west wind from the desert wreathes the raintoo late to fill our wells, but soon enough,the four-day rain that bears the leaves away.
Song with the wind will change, but is still songand pierces to the rightness in the wrongor makes the wrong a rightness, a delight.
Where are the eager guests that yesterdaythronged at the gate?
Like leaves, they could not stay,the winds of doctrine blew their minds away,and we shall have no loving-cup tonight.
No loving-cup: for not ourselves are hereto entertain us in that outer year,where, so they say, we see the Greater Earth.
The winds of doctrine blow our minds away,and we are absent till another birth.
X Beyond the Sugar Loaf, in the far wood,under the four-day rain, gunshot is heardand with the falling leaf the falling birdflutters her crimson at the huntsman's foot.
Life looks down at death, death looks up at life,the eyes exchange the secret under rain,rain all the way from heaven: and all threeknow and are known, share and are shared, a silentmoment of union and communion.
Have we comethis way before, and at some other time?
Is it the Wind Wheel Circle we have come?
We know the eye of death, and in it toothe eye of god, that closes as in sleep,giving its light, giving its life, away:clouding itself as consciousness from pain,clouding itself, and then, the shutter shut.
And will this eye of god awake again?
Or is this what he loses, loses once,but always loses, and forever lost?
It is the always and unredeemable costof his invention, his fatigue.
The eyecloses, and no other takes its place.
It is the end of god, each time, each time.
Yet, though the leaves must fall, the galaxiesrattle, detach, and fall, each to his ownperplexed and individual death,
Lady Yanggone with the inkberry's vermilion stalk,the peony face behind a fan of frost,the blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain,beyond recall by any alchemistor incantation from the Book of Change:unresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill,the fir cone of a thousand years ago:still, in the loving, and the saying so,as when we name the hill, and, with the name,bestow an essence, and a meaning, too:do we endow them with our lives?
They moveinto another orbit: into a timenot theirs: and we become the bell to speakthis time: as we become new eyeswith which they see, the voicein which they find duration, short or long,the chthonic and hermetic song.
Beyond Sheepfold Hill,gunshot again, the bird flies forth to meetpredestined death, to look with conscious sightinto the eye of lightthe light unflinching that understands and loves.
And Sheepfold Hill accepts them, and is still.
XI The landscape and the language are the same.
And we ourselves are language and are land,together grew with Sheepfold Hill, rock, and hand,and mind, all taking substance in a thoughtwrought out of mystery: birdflight and airpredestined from the first to be a pair:as, in the atom, the living rhymeinvented her divisions, which in time,and in the terms of time, would make and breakthe text, the texture, and then all remake.
This powerful mind that can by thinking takethe order of the world and all remake,will it, for joy in breaking, break insteadits own deep thought that thought itself be dead?
Already in our coil of rock and hand,hidden in the cloud of mind, burning, fading,under the waters, in the eyes of sand,was that which in its time would understand.
Already in the Kingdom of the Deadthe scrolls were waiting for the names and datesand what would there irrevocably be said.
The brush was in the hand, the poem was in the love,the praise was in the word.
The ‘Book of Lives'listed the name,
Li Po, as an Immortal;and it was time to travel.
Not, this year,north to the Damask City, or the Gorge,but, by the phoenix borne, swift as the wind,to the Jade Palace Portal.
Therelook through the clouded to the clearand there watch evil like a brush-stroke disappearin the last perfect rhymeof the begin-all-end-all poem, time.
II Northwest by north.
The grasshopper weathervanebares to the moon his golden breastplate, swingsin his predicted circle, gilded legs and wingsbright with frost, predicting frost.
The tidescales with moon-silver, floods the marsh,
Payne Creek and Quivett Creek, rises to liftthe fishing-boats against a jetty wall;and past them floods the plankton and the weedand limp sea-lettuce for the horseshoe crabwho sleeps till daybreak in his nest of reed.
The hour is open as the mind is open.
Closed as the mind is closed.
Opens as the hand opensto receive the ghostly snowflakes of the moon, closesto feel the sunbeams of the bloodstream warmour human inheritance of touch.
The air tonightbrings back, to the all-remembering world, its ghosts,borne from the Great Year on the Wind Wheel Circle.
On that invisible wave we lift, we too,and drag at secret moorings,stirred by the ancient currents that gave us birth.
And they are here,
Li Po and all the others,our fathers and our mothers: the dead leaf's footsteptouches the grass: those who were lost at seaand those the innocents the too-soon dead: all mankindand all it ever knew is here in-gathered,held in our hands, and in the windbreathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill.
How still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting Househow still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this,now long since dead, but then how young,how young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frostlooked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heardborne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word:the father within him, the mother within him, the selfcoming to self through love of each for each.
In this small mute democracy of stonesis it Abiel or Li Po who liesand lends us against death our speech?
They are the same, and it is both who teach.
The poets and the prophecies are ours:and these are with us as we turn, in turn,the leaves of love that fill the Book of Change.
