Letter

Today I did almost nothing.
Read a little, tried to write a sentence
to make another sentence seem necesary.

I wasn't unhappy. Everything
I could will myself to do I'd done,
so I said I'd done enough.

Now I'm looking out my window:
white pine, ash, a single birch,
the leanings and crossings

of branches. And then the sky:
pale, undecided. Years ago
you wrote to me about a matter

that worried you, and you said
at the end, "That's probaly the best,
and most true, way to think about it."

I kept your sentence in my notebook.
I liked its shaped. I admired the way,
young as you were, you could feel

one kind of thinking
adjusting into another, one truth
becoming a better truth.

Now you're far off, and alone, and I
have no advice you haven't already
given yourself. What can I tell you?

That I'm here? That today, when I saw
how tenderly the light was moving
amoung those trees, I thought of you?

-- Lawrence Raab

from 21 Love Poems

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

--Adrienne Rich

Two years ago tomorrow. That ___ is worse does not make me any better. Children are we three. Ugh.

By Li Po

I

Among the blossoms, a single jar of wine.
No one else here, I ladle it out myself.

Raising my cup, I toast the bright moon,
and facing my shadow make friends three,

though moon has never understood wine,
and shadow only trails along behind me.

Kindred a moment with moon and shadow,
I've found a joy that must infuse spring:

I sing, and moon rocks back and forth;
I dance, and shadows tumble into pieces.

Sober, we're together and happy. Drunk,
we scatter away into our own directions:

intimates forever, we'll wander carefree
and meet again in Star River distances.

II

Surely, if heaven didn't love wine,
there would be no Wine Star in heaven,

and if earth didn't love wine, surely
there would be no Wine Spring on earth.

Heaven and earth have always loved wine,
so how could loving wine shame heaven?

I hear clear wine called enlightenment,
and they say murky wine is like wisdom:

once you drink enlightenment and wisdom,
why go searching for gods and immortals?

Three cups and I've plumbed the great Way,
a jarful and I've merged with occurence

appearing of itself. Wine's view is lived:
you can't preach doctrine to the sober.

III

It's April in Ch'ang-an, these thousand
blossoms making a brocade of daylight.

Who can bear spring's lonely sorrows,
who face it without wine? It's the only way.

Success or failure, life long or short:
our fate's given by Changemaker at birth.

But a single cup evens out life and death,
our ten thousand concerns unfathomed,

and once I'm drunk, all heaven and earth
vanish, leaving me suddenly alone in bed,

forgetting that person I am even exists.
Of all our joys, this must be deepest.

(translated by David Hinton)