Meditation in Exile

 by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from Li Yu, Poem 25

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 the servant, a nay
to the tonic of the waiting teacup.

I am alone. I am not among
the endless scrolls of my old poems —
gone and lost! I mouth the words
of those I can remember — others
must be my memorial called forth
to the minds of surviving friends.
My mouth seems full of stones,
my words, choked back.

                                              All ears,
I wait for for the next west-east
fluttering amid the bamboo leaves,
wind a new moon always prompts.
The breeze, at least, still chatters on.

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.
The think me unmusical.
The melodies they want to play
are not the ones I know.

Someone, I see, has not removed
the hundred-year-old wine jar,
nor my ink pot and its brushes.
As for calligraphy, what is mine,
drawn with a hand that shakes,
against that cracked-ice poem
that just now melts on the lake?
Once, I would have indicated that
with but one finger, and someone
would have rushed to draw it.

On the deep, dark terrace behind me
a single candle burns, one ember
beside it, incense out of breath.

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?

One palace is like
another palace; the same earth
turns below home and exile.
Here, there is the pretense
     of status and honor.
Who am I to complain?
I could well write
another thousand poems.

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.

But how can words come,
when thought is unthinkable?