Ambition

This summer I shall
Return to our Longhouse
Hide beneath a feathered hat,
And become an Old Man.

Phil George (of the Nez Percé Nation at Lapwai, Washington)

[from the WHISPERING WIND, Poetry by Young American Indians, edited by Terry Allen, Doubleday, 1972.]

The works of Phil George (b. 1946), a Wallowa Nez Percé poet, have been published in several anthologies, including The Remembered Earth (1979) and Dancing on the Rim of the World (1990). His poetry has even been read on popular television shows, such as the Tonight Show and the Dick Cavett Show. Born in Seattle, Washington, George attended Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is also a champion Traditional Plateau dancer. George wrote, produced, and narrated the program A Season for Grandmothers for the Public Broadcasting Service. His work is showcased at the Nez Percé National Historical Park in Spaulding, Idaho.

Alicante

Une orange sur la table
aaaTa robe sur le tapis
aaaEt toi dans mon lit.
Doux présent du présent
aaaFraîcheur de la nuit
aaaChaleur de ma vie.

Alicante

An orange on the table
aaYour dress on the rug
aaaaAnd you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
aaaaCool of the night
aaWarmth of my life.

[From PAROLES, Selected Poems by Jacques Prévert, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Books 1958]

The sprung flight of doves –
with each ascent it seems they
just invented it.

Wobbly candle flame
nervous as a timid child
afraid of the dark.

The Socks

While you were away
I matched your socks
and rolled them into balls.
Then I filled your drawers with
tight dark fists.

earth kissed,
by the fiery lip, rising…
morning love

John Brandi

goes back to my New Mexico days. He used to live near a potter friend of mine in Chimayo. Brandi was a friend of hers. I never met him. He seemed to be always traveling to distant places. But wherever I found a book of his around Taos or Santa Fe, I bought it. They all seemed very personal, truly hand-made, straight from the poet’s heart and hand…SKY HOURSE a particular little treasure, perfect bound, only about 4 x 5 inches, filled with John’s drawings and poems. He wrote a kind of Zen-Southwest haiku poem, and a little more. I have no idea where he is today…Mexico? New Mexico? South America? I’m glad I have some of his books. –norbert blei

Okay, Issa
Alright,
Buson—

I give back
all I stole!

No!

I’m not putting
on a white
shirt, for the sake
of a poem—

who took the prize
today, O
windmill—

sunrise
or sunset: north
wind
or south?

Oh no!

The broom
stands up, &
sweeps me
out of my
own
house

Ah—

that map
the morning after

India,
in your dark
triangle

[from SKY HOURSE, A Tooth of the Time Publication, 1980 300 copies]

Four from Lilliput Review #171:
Charlie Mehrhoff, C.L. O’Dell, Lauramarie Taylor, Grant Hackett

Between:
I remain in this body
and wait
for the poet to return.

-Charlie Mehrhoff

Thought
is the way wind
moves paper.

-C.L. O’Dell

roadside
little girl walking backwards

-Lauramarie Taylor

Dear Soul : : How can I tolerate your tracks in the snow

-Grant Hackett

Robert Wilkinson and Li Po

This is the third posting in a row, the second on “variations on the theme of Li Po.” It’s always fascinating to read the effect of one writer (sometimes an ‘ancient’) on another. And here we have the poet, Robert Wilkinson, wrestling with the words, time, presence of Li Po, so artfully.

GREEN LOTUS MAN is a somewhat faded chapbook, almost thirty years old, that I rediscovered tucked/lost on the poetry shelves in my library the other night. And how apropos, Li Po! The cover, everything about it is so devoid of design, empty, yet solid, printed on creamy thick paper that one must give praise again to those writers and publishers who keep it simple with the common chapbook. Which, nevertheless, occasionally invites a bare minimum to ‘art’ in its presentation.

This chapbook is bound by a single green thread. Just right. Just enough. -norbert blei

“Green Lotus Man” is a name Li Po gave himself in one of his poems, written very probably while he was drunk. One of the greatest heroes of the spirit the human race has yet produced, Li Po climbed into nearly all the nine heavens on the twin wings of poetry and drunkenness. These poems are not translations—they are occasions for a meeting. Versions. –Robert Wilkinson

Green Lotus Man

Behind this moony mug I’m Green Lotus Man,
a creature more than merely human, a cut-winged
Angel drummed, for several complex reasons,
out of the high company of Immortals.
Since then I’ve taken to dousing my once-clear
radiance carousing in dives like this.
But, what point in lengthy explanations, friend?
What you see before you is what I’ve become:
moon-cheeked sorrowing Buddha of the drunken dawn!

Two Poets Drunk by Lantern Light

In the night my old beat-up lantern
looks the double of the cold half-rind of moon,
and the green bottle set between us shines
like the source of all pure light.
Hooting to nothing in particular, shouting poems,
we flush a heron from the sedge, his wings
oaring him slowly up, and over the moon.

Li Po to Tu Fu

I saw Tu Fu on Fan-kuo mountain,
peaked bamboo hat keeping off the sun.
Mr. Tu, why are you so bent and thin,
have you been hurting yourself on poems again?

Moon-viewing with a Friend

Way up here we can gaze out over
the dove-grey hills of Yo-yang
where the curly waters of the river
empty into Tung-ting lake. High
above us, in the twilight, blue-grey
geese drift east on shadow wings.
I wish my fears were off with them.
But never mind! Comrade mountain
across the valley is about to launch
a round, red moon, and before he does
I want to spread this basket of chicken,
good white wine, and eat and drink
until we drop. Then, old friend, we
may learn a thing or two musing on
clouds that pass reflected in pale-straw
liquid in our cups. When
we’re too drunk to see mountain or
moon and the night wind’s rising sky¬ward
like a thousand birds of dark,
we’ll stagger up one last time to dance
our fine ecstasy of wine and mountain
wind
aaaa-ha!-
aaaaaaaaatwo old men with
skinny knees, legs flashing beneath
the moon, loose sleeves flapping
like awkward wings.

White Hair, Deep Mirror

That image I see, staring back from the mirror.
Thin white hair fringing my skull
falls down my back, then below
like a waterfall, thirty thousand feet.
Exactly the depth of my sorrow!

Spring, South Bank of the Yangtze

Spring runs along furrows like a thin green mold.
A yellow bird chitters, endlessly, from a pine branch.
Alone in my room above the White Heron Tavern
on the south bank of the Yangtze, I grow fat, and old.
Even if I had a home, I wouldn’t know how to find it.
Or who’d be there to kiss me, calling “husband,” “father.”
In my dreams, I still climb mountains, silly with youth,
exhaling poems with my breath, dazzling the light.
Waking this morning, eyes sticky with age, I curse
my shadow and shiver beneath the pale moon of Chu.
I make no excuses. I’ve let my life flow past.
Like the dirty river below, there was no way to stop it.
Back home, my vegetable garden grows thistles and crows.
Friends dead or forgotten, no use to turn upstream now.
I’ll spend the day getting drunk, shouting my Collected
Poems to spiders who doze in the dust under my bed …
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand to hell with a happy death!

[Source: GREEN LOTUS MAN, Spoon River Poetry Press.1982]

BIO of the poet, Robert Wilkinson—as of 1982:

Robert Wilkinson grew up on a farm in Washington State, where he was born, in Seattle, in 1942. After a four-year tour in the Air Force, in France, he took degrees from the University of Hawaii, Boston College, and Washington State University, where he taught for three years. Presently he teaches in the English department at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. He has published poems in many journals and little magazines, among them Poetry North west. The Prairie Schooner, The New Orleans Review, Salted Feathers, Open Places, The Spoon River Quarterly, and The New Jersey Poetry Journal. A chapbook. Survivors, was published in 1971 by The Stone-Marrow Press. Mr. Wilkinson will be represented in a forthcoming anthology of Pacific Northwest poets. Mr. Wilkinson lives in Ghent, Minnesota, with his two children, only a few doors away from the Silver Dollar Bar.

A POEM BY LI PO RECENTLY DISCOVERED IN A BOX CONTAINING A CHILD’S TOY THAT WON’T STOP REPEATING AN INFERNAL NOISE & translated by Eric Chaet

Drinking In the East

LI PO

A.D. 701-762

CH’ING P’ING LYRICS

Waking in the gallery
at dawn, and told it’s snowing,

I raise the blinds and gaze into pure good fortune. Courtyard steps a bright mirage of distance,

kitchen smoke trails light through flurried skies, and the cold hangs jewels among whitened grasses.

Must be heaven’s immortals in a drunken frenzy
grabbing cloud and grinding it into white dust.

DRINKING ALONE BENEATH THE MOON

2
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 occurrence

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

3
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 the deepest.

SPUR OF THE MOMENT

Facing wine, I missed night coming on
and falling blossoms filling my robes.

Drunk, I rise and wade the midstream moon,
birds soon gone, and people scarcer still.

From the Introduction to THE SELECTED POEMS BY LI PO translated by David Hinton:

“In 762, a sick Li Po went to visit his “cousin” Li Yang-ping, one of the great T’ang calligraphers. It was the last in a lifetime of journeys. In the end, tzu-jan is the form of loss. Li Po arrived at Li Yang-ping’s home with a confusion of rough drafts which, being desperately ill, he asked Li Yang-ping to edit and preserve. He had managed to keep only a few hundred of the several thousand poems he’d written, and these were in turn soon lost. Another collection, of unknown origin, was discovered and edited by Li Po’s friend, Wei Hao, but it too was lost. Little is known about the history of these texts, or what transformations they underwent, until they were combined in a printed edition hundreds of years later. Meanwhile, poems and manuscripts scat¬tered around the country were collected and edited, and many of them were presumably included in the com¬bined edition, though no one knows how many were actually written by Li Po. Of the several thousand poems he is said to have written, the collection we now have contains only about 1100, and only a portion of these is authentic. So the large majority of Li Po’s work was apparently lost, especially that written during the difficult years of the rebellion. (Had this work survived, Li Po might look a little more politically engaged than he now does.) Combined with the dubious authenticity of so many surviving poems and the lack of biographi¬cal information, this loss makes Li Po as much unknown as known, as much legend as history. It may be just as well, for the legend Li Po made of himself is more consistent and compelling if he remains, like the moon, an enduring mystery. Whatever actually happened at Li Yang-ping’s house in the winter of 762, Li Po died as the legend says he died: out drunk in a boat, he fell into a river and drowned trying to embrace the moon. —D.H.

[All poems and text from THE SELECTED POEMS OF LI PO, Translated by David Hinton, A New Directions Book, 1996, winner of the 1997 Harold Morton Landon Award.]