Poetry

Something in a locomotive, that black-clad traffic’s rush,
            something in the silver-tinted background: always
that tally of progress & catastrophe, engines wrecked

It’s not new, this condition, just for awhile
kept deep
in the cortex of things imagined

Long I had heard of Lake Tung-t’ing 
And now at last I have climbed the tower.
Wu is to the east, and Chu to the south,

As if you were a child again; you smooth
a little space of sand, with careful fingers
pick out a twig, a stone, a scrap of paper,

When all the centuries return,
night falling, to their beauty,
to the ends of the universe rises
the deep oneness of the earth.