Serenity

[rejectomorph]

Night becomes ordinary and is uneventful. An overcast relieves the sky of half its burden of stars. There is no moon. The dark trees seem weightless, hovering between invisible ground and vague heavens. The cold air is utterly still. No sound but my footsteps breaks the silence. Hours pass and nothing happens, nothing changes but the mottled pattern of the sky and the stars that emerge and are concealed, again and again. I think the world is slowing to a stop.



Sunday Verse

Six Quatrains

by Tu Fu


1

From the water east of our fence, sun
Ascends. North of home: mud-borne clouds.
A kingfisher cries from bamboo heights,
And on the sand below, magpies dance.


2

Blossoms scatter, bees and butterflies
Stitching the lavish confusion with flight.
Perched in solitude, I plumb idleness-
What would guests come looking for?


3

For a new well- wellrope of braided palm
Leaves, drains cut through bamboo roots. Antic
Little boats are just tangled rigging; here,
Small paths weave our village into itself.


4

Streams swollen after headlong rains, late
Light caresses a tree's waist. Two yellow
Birds keep hidden in their nest. Where
Shattered reeds float, a white fish leaps.


5

Bamboo needles our fence. Cane is toppled
In under eaves. The land turning to sunlit
Silk slowly, reeds and the river gone
White weave together in tracery shadows.


6

Moonlight across stone, the river flows.
At the brook's mirage, clouds touch blossoms.
A perched bird knows the ancient Tao. Sails
Only drift toward night spent in whose home?


-translated by Kenneth Rexroth

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Sometimes I'm amused by the utterly expected.