“Night-Shining White” by Han Gan (ca. 750)

Tiny threads of rein and bridle
look as if added in a later world
to arrest his bucking head, to calm
his terror-filled eye, white-haloed.
He is the very picture of fear
and is tethered to a pole
so his four feet, levitated for flight,
are frozen in time. Could I know
what frightens him if this print
were more than detail,
if the characters of black brush stroke
and red pictorial stamps
were of my time and language?
The story reflected in his eye
is mine, though, speaks that moment
when all is not as we long held.

My own are scattershot
and the neighbors’ flicker
and stutter like the lives
of diners peering at menus
within little squares of light
on a passing train. How can I
help picturing myself up above
in Seat 17A looking out
at clouds, myself the size
of a baby’s thumbnail
on that passenger jet
still lifting on its way
to Kansas City. Right now
I see Steve’s living room lights
at 6 a.m. on Sunday, so I wonder
if he, the neighbor who wears
earphones when he mows,
ever gets a day off, and if he is
still Steve, the one I knew
long ago, or someone new?
And do any of them notice
my empty driveway
every Monday night, and do any
of our patterns matter?
In a Texas museum we sat
and watched an filmmaker’s
vision of city highrises
flickering off and on as days
and nights passed in a hurry.
And now I remember how important
the mission of that one ant
my young son and I watched,
its mandibles clamped tight
with the sail of a green blade
of grass, and how he crossed
and re-crossed the dirt path,
wandered in circles
through forests of dry weeds,
and though we long-watched,
he never found (or did he ever?)
his way home with his treasure.

“…if poets (often lacking God,
less often lacking cats)…” – Dan Chiasson

I’ve often heard that politicians
own dogs and we with creative natures
tend towards cats, and I wonder why.
Do politicians need clear emotions,
eyes filled with slavish devotion
or rage on the verge of attack,
while we of poetic bent
have become accustomed
to the blank, disinterested stare?

Thoreau hoed his 24,750 bean plants
from 5 A.M. till noon each day.
I cannot say the furry little things
are worth the effort, though they
have their own charms when
Chinese-restaurant green
or flavored with bread crumbs
and garlicky butter.
My mother always warned me
against my passion for the slick beans
at the top of a newly-opened can,
but I’m still here and Thoreau is not.
He only lasted 26 months at Walden,
and I’m still levering open tins,
still savoring those first slick fruits.
There are no rules
when it comes to love.

Used for jelly and wine,
wild cherry syrup for coughs
from the bark, the wood
red-brown with whitish
sapwood, resistant
to decay, durable,
the small cherries are called drupes,
leave yellowed stones.
Found in oak hickory woods,
not here.  I would re-arrange
the world this morning, bring
the trees walking towards me
like Orpheus or MacBeth.
Instead the words of those saw-toothed
leaves float down about me,
and a forest of silent sound swallows
the light of here and now.

Wild Transitions Contents