Exile, Under the New Moon

Adapted from the Chinese of Li Yü

I know I should go in, now.

It is best to forget it all, better to sleep
and recall it to ghost-life; least-best

is waiting out the night here,

thinking of those who have gone.

The wind is back in the courtyard

(new wind or ever the same one?)

and the dull grass is sliced

    with new green slivers.
Spring, undeniable,  paints yellow-green

in willow shoots.

Long I recline on the balustrade,

waving away my servant, a nay

to the tonic of the waiting teacup.

I am alone. I am not

reciting old poems. My mouth

is clamped with the forgetting

of mere words. All ears,

I wait for for the next west-east

fluttering amid the bamboo leaves

wind of a new moon as always.

Away, where I am missed

and amid those I despair of,

exactly the same sky shivers.

Rubbing their hands

     together, the pi-pa players

await my orders. What tune

can I order amid the willow rush,

the ruffle of wind in the cat-tails?

I gesture them to stillness. They bow.

Old Chen, I see, has not removed

the hundred-year-old wine jar,

nor my ink pot and its brushes.

As for calligraphy, what is mine

against that cracked-ice poem

that just now melts on the lake face.

On the deep, dark terrace behind me

burns a single candle, one ember

beside it, last breath of incense.

The past.   The past.   The dawn

that I am facing is solitary;

there seems scant need to undress

but to rise and re-dress again,

for whom,  or for what?

I feel in my hair the gnawing frost,

as on my brow the last snow

hovers at edge of vision

and refuses to melt.

I     will     just    sit.

Thought is unthinkable.