It's not Wednesday.

It is, in fact, Friday. I was going to backdate this post to make it look like it was up on Wednesday, but that would be a lie.

Guilt at Leaving the Hermit's Life

To stay in the mountains is called great ambition;
leaving the mountains you become a small weed.
It was already stated in ancient times.
Why didn't I foresee all this happening?
All my life I longed to go my own way
and to give my ambition to hills and valleys.
I paint and write for my own entertainment,
hoping to keep my nature wild.
Unfortunately, I am trapped in a net of dust,
I turn and get tangled up.
I was a gull over the waters,
now a bird in cage.
Who cares about my sad singing?
Day by day my feathers dry to ruin.
Without relatives' and friends' help,
vegetables and fruit were often scarce.
My sick wife carried my weak son,
and they left for a place ten thousand miles away.
We were separated, flesh and bones,
and our family tombs have no one to tend them.
When sorrow is deep, words all gone,
I gaze at clouds riding south till my vision fails.
A sad wind comes and I cry,
"How can I tell heaven my story?"

-Zhao Menfu

The Path

People believe that they create a path for themselves but
the path does not quietly conform to what people intend.
Either it drags people onward until suddenly
there they are, stranded in failure at the edge of a cliff,
or it deliberately dives into a flood, forcing them to leave it.
Seeing this, people claim that the man-made path teaches
the wisdom of living, not the other way round;
equally they claim that it calls people abroad
and shows them every kind of place and way of living;
that is how it instructs them in the principles of life.
So they believe that such is all the path's intent.
They do not realize that the path leads people
from the outside inward
and obliges them to scrutinize their own hidden depths.
The path only grows subservient to those who know
that it leads not outward but inward,
embroidering itself with flowers, increasing their scent,
casting a shadow and enabling people to cool their sweat.
People who once know that will never be heard to claim
that it was they who made the path they took.

-Shin Kyong-Rim

The Necklace (XXXII)

The Gulf! Whole oceans scaled over my head,
and gold fish fashioned out of crystallites,
I ask where Madam Moonlight’s lain abed,
and blue horizons haze blue mountain heights.

The dawn is spiked with delicate clear dread,
thought’s needles – piercing, lucid – snap and freeze.
No scales or spirals raise me, spirited,
nor mirrorings of rocked realities.

The heart’s a world unfathomed, fertile, deep,
and man, beneath his lead sky, breaks and sinks,
while life, a seagull, soars above his head.

Aye, well-fed easy woman, stuffed on bread,
thought’s rhythms broke our last connecting links,
but oh, how heart and pulse beat, beat and leap.

-Tin Ujević

Conjugation

This early the garden’s bare
but people pay to walk it,

at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,

and stoop to mouth the names—
araucaria

araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something

Japanese—each particular
ridiculous to be.

-Nate Klug, 2010

Driving in Oklahoma

On humming rubber along this white concrete,
lighthearted between the gravities
of source and destination like a man
halfway to the moon
in this bubble of tuneless whistling
at seventy miles an hour from the windvents,
over prairie swells rising
and falling, over the quick offramp
that drops to its underpass and the truck
thundering beneath as I cross
with the country music twanging out my windows,
I'm grooving down this highway feeling
technology is freedom's other name when
—a meadowlark
comes sailing across my windshield
with breast shining yellow
and five notes pierce
the windroar like a flash
of nectar on mind,
gone as the country music swells up and drops
-------------------------------me wheeling down
----------------------my notch of cement-bottomed sky
-----------------------------between home and away
and wanting
to move again through country that a bird
has defined wholly with song,
and maybe next time see how
-------------------------he flies so easy, when he sings.

-Carter Revard, 2005

Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

-Delmore Schwartz, 1959