by Mark Fischweicher
I take you down the trail with me, Du Fu.
I give you these canyons,
inhospitable, bleak, barren rock.
Perfectly Pink Utah podiums, cut
into postcard ruins.
Free as dust, lifted from the sea 60 million years ago,
posing now as lacy steeples, limestone royalty,
frayed old chessmen waiting for the next move.
That ridge – they call The Sentinel,
there, Thor’s Hammer; there, The Sinking Ship and
there, in the distance,
Chinese Wall,
not as long, I admit
but with the same moon over it;
the same moon over all.
I smile at the sadness you bring me.
The Cretaceous ocean hasn’t invaded North America for eons
but I see it washing up against the Gulf Coast now,
ready to devour Florida at any time
ending the lines at Disneyland,
leaving only canyons behind.
Not even canyons, just the wind and the dust,
already characters in your cracked
old poem.
I have read poetry for many years and make but little pretense.
The blooming lilies do not make me weep,
The singing birds here do not shock my heart.
The dust claws at it.
The frost chips away at it,
and the wind, silent now,
as much a part of it as you are,
having died a thousand years ago or more
and never having heard of U
tah
as it will hear of you.
But “No one listens to poetry,” said Jack, says the wind
again and again.
The way we’re going,
Someday it might all look like Utah,
deserted courtyards, swept clean as any yard in Athens,
Georgia,
clean as your prince’s garden, Du,
the one in ruins that you saw,
that made you see that nothing would be left,
not the palace, not the pinnacles
not even the poem.
No volcanoes left to erupt the white pages.
Whether we imagine it or not
the palace is gone, the poems, annotated,
followed by questions and a possible quiz.
The wind does not need to be heard.
Quietly,
the oldest trees arch their roots
into the sloping red dust that no longer reminds me just of you, Du,
now that you are here,
that coats my shoes as I walk now with Simon, my five year old.
And, that summer –
the rivers flooded the midwest,
drought and heat burned up the east,
Sarajevo continued to die,
Akita was buried in ash
and New Yorkers
headed for the beaches
once again. . .
“Paiutes called them legend people,
turned to stone by Coyote’s anger.”
Simon heard the story,
saw a postcard of Mount Rushmore
and noted how angry the Gods must’ve been at those guys.
And, further south in Arizona, all that’s left
are monoliths, huge single stones spread across
a vast valley of dust and sand.
Years ago, I stopped there in an old blue Plymouth,
Valiant,
not us; we had to sleep in the car.
The wind rocked the chassis much of the night
and painted it, covered it with the red sand,
ready to take us in.
Ready to take us
in.
*Du Fu ( 712-770) – Tang Dynasty poet.
The poem cited is Kenneth Rexroth’s translation of Jade Flower Palace
Mark Fischweicher has been scratching out poems since junior high school and still hopes it may become a regular thing.
