free-verse433 lines

A Letter From Li Po

by Conrad Potter Aiken

Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind

announces autumn, and the equinox

rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.

Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,

looking for friendship or an old love's sleeve

or writing letters to his children, lost,

and to his children's children, and to us.

What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?

Say that it changed, for better or for worse,

sifted by leaves, sifted by snow; on mulberry silk

a slant of witch-light; on the pure text

a slant of genius; emptying mind and heart

for winecups and more winecups and more words.

What was his time? Say that it was a change,

but constant as a changing thing may be,

from chicory's moon-dark blue down the taut scale

to chicory's tenderest pink, in a pink field

such as imagination dreams of thought.

But of the heart beneath the winecup moon

the tears that fell beneath the winecup moon

for children lost, lost lovers, and lost friends,

what can we say but that it never ends?

Even for us it never ends, only begins.

Yet to spell down the poem on her page,

margining her phrases, parsing forth

the sevenfold prism of meaning, up the scale

from chicory pink to blue, is to assume

Li Po himself: as he before assumed

the poets and the sages who were his.

Like him, we too have eaten of the word:

with him are somewhere lost beyond the Gorge:

and write, in rain, a letter to lost children,

a letter long as time and brief as love.

And yet not love, not only love. Not caritas

or only that. Nor the pink chicory love,

deep as it may be, even to moon-dark blue,

in which the dragon of his meaning flew

for friends or children lost, or even

for the beloved horse, for Li Po's horse:

not these, in the self's circle so embraced:

too near, too dear, for pure assessment: no,

a letter crammed and creviced, crannied full,

storied and stored as the ripe honeycomb

with other faith than this. As of sole pride

and holy loneliness, the intrinsic face

worn by the always changing shape between

end and beginning, birth and death.

How moves that line of daring on the map?

Where was it yesterday, or where this morning

when thunder struck at seven, and in the bay

the meteor made its dive, and shed its wings,

and with them one more Icarus? Where struck

that lightning-stroke which in your sleep you saw

wrinkling across the eyelid? Somewhere else?

But somewhere else is always here and now.

Each moment crawls that lightning on your eyelid:

each moment you must die. It was a tree

that this time died for you: it was a rock

and with it all its local web of love:

a chimney, spilling down historic bricks:

perhaps a skyful of Ben Franklin's kites.

And with them, us. For we must hear and bear

the news from everywhere: the hourly news,

infinitesimal or vast, from everywhere.

III

Sole pride and loneliness: it is the state

the kingdom rather of all things: we hear

news of the heart in weather of the Bear,

slide down the rungs of Cassiopeia's Chair,

still on the nursery floor, the Milky Way;

and, if we question one, must question all.

What is this 'man'? How far from him is 'me'?

Who, in this conch-shell, locked the sound of sea?

We are the tree, yet sit beneath the tree,

among the leaves we are the hidden bird,

we are the singer and are what is heard.

What is this 'world'? Not Li Po's Gorge alone,

and yet, this too might be. 'The wind was high

north of the White King City, by the fields

of whistling barley under cuckoo sky,'

where, as the silkworm drew her silk, Li Po

spun out his thoughts of us. 'Endless as silk'

(he said) 'these poems for lost loves, and us,'

and, 'for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.'

Here is the divine loneliness in which

we greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word,

the smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a face

touched, and loved, but still unknown, and then

a body, still mysterious in embrace.

Taste lost as touch is lost, only to leave

dust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve:

and yet, for the inadmissible, to grieve.

Of leaf and love, at last, only to doubt:

from world within or world without, kept out.

Caucus of robins on an alien shore

as of the Ho-Ho birds at Jewel Gate

southward bound and who knows where and never late

or lost in a roar at sea. Rovers of chaos

each one the 'Rover of Chao,' whose slight bones

shall put to shame the swords. We fly with these,

have always flown, and they

stay with us here, stand still and stay,

while, exiled in the Land of Pa, Li Po

still at the Wine Spring stoops to drink the moon.

And northward now, for fall gives way to spring,

from Sandy Hook and Kitty Hawk they wing,

and he remembers, with the pipes and flutes,

drunk with joy, bewildered by the chance

that brought a friend, and friendship, how, in vain,

he strove to speak, 'and in long sentences,' his pain.

Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The 'far away,'

language of desert, language of ocean, language of sky,

as of the unfathomable worlds that lie

between the apple and the eye,

these are the only words we learn to say.

Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day

we find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose,

a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source.

This cornucopia of air! This very heaven

of simple day! We do not know, can never know,

the alphabet to find us entrance there.

So, in the street, we stand and stare,

to greet a friend, and shake his hand,

yet know him beyond knowledge, like ourselves;

ocean unknowable by unknowable sand.

The locust tree spills sequins of pale gold

in spiral nebulae, borne on the Invisible

earthward and deathward, but in change to find

the cycles to new birth, new life. Li Po

allowed his autumn thoughts like these to flow,

and, from the Gorge, sends word of Chouang's dream.

Did Chouang dream he was a butterfly?

Or did the butterfly dream Chouang? If so,

why then all things can change, and change again,

the sea to brook, the brook to sea, and we

from man to butterfly; and back to man.

This 'I,' this moving 'I,' this focal 'I,'

which changes, when it dreams the butterfly,

into the thing it dreams of; liquid eye

in which the thing takes shape, but from within

as well as from without: this liquid 'I':

how many guises, and disguises, this

nimblest of actors takes, how many names

puts on and off, the costumes worn but once,

the player queen, the lover, or the dunce,

hero or poet, father or friend,

suiting the eloquence to the moment's end;

childlike, or bestial; the language of the kiss

sensual or simple; and the gestures, too,

as slight as that with which an empire falls,

or a great love's abjured; these feignings, sleights,

savants, or saints, or fly-by-nights,

the novice in her cell, or wearing tights

on the high wire above a hell of lights:

what's true in these, or false? which is the 'I'

of 'I's'? Is it the master of the cadence, who

transforms all things to a hoop of flame, where through

tigers of meaning leap? And are these true,

the language never old and never new,

such as the world wears on its wedding day,

the something borrowed with something chicory blue?

In every part we play, we play ourselves;

even the secret doubt to which we come

beneath the changing shapes of self and thing,

yes, even this, at last, if we should call

and dare to name it, we would find

the only voice that answers is our own.

We are once more defrauded by the mind.

Defrauded? No. It is the alchemy by which we grow.

It is the self becoming word, the word

becoming world. And with each part we play

we add to cosmic Sum and cosmic sum.

Who knows but one day we shall find,

hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,

the square root of the eccentric absolute,

and the concentric absolute to come.

The thousand eyes, the Argus 'I's' of love,

of these it was, in verse, that Li Po wove

the magic cloak for his last going forth,

into the Gorge for his adventure north.

What is not seen or said? The cloak of words

loves all, says all, sends back the word

whether from Green Spring, and the yellow bird

'that sings unceasing on the banks of Kiang,'

or 'from the Green Moss Path, that winds and winds,

nine turns for every hundred steps it winds,

up the Sword Parapet on the road to Shuh.'

'Dead pinetrees hang head-foremost from the cliff.

The cataract roars downward. Boulders fall

Splitting the echoes from the mountain wall.

No voice, save when the nameless birds complain,

in stunted trees, female echoing male;

or, in the moonlight, the lost cuckoo's cry,

piercing the traveller's heart. Wayfarer from afar,

why are you here? what brings you here? why here?'

VII

Why here. Nor can we say why here. The peachtree bough

scrapes on the wall at midnight, the west wind

sculptures the wall of fog that slides

seaward, over the Gulf Stream.

The rat

comes through the wainscot, brings to his larder

the twinned acorn and chestnut burr. Our sleep

lights for a moment into dream, the eyes

turn under eyelids for a scene, a scene,

o and the music, too, of landscape lost.

And yet, not lost. For here savannahs wave

cressets of pampas, and the kingfisher

binds all that gold with blue.

Why here? why here?

Why does the dream keep only this, just this C?

Yes, as the poem or the music do?

The timelessness of time takes form in rhyme:

the lotus and the locust tree rehearse

a four-form song, the quatrain of the year:

not in the clock's chime only do we hear

the passing of the Now into the past,

the passing into future of the Now:

hut in the alteration of the bough

time becomes visible, becomes audible,

becomes the poem and the music too:

time becomes still, time becomes time, in rhyme.

Thus, in the Court of Aloes, Lady Yang

called the musicians from the Pear Tree Garden,

called for Li Po, in order that the spring,

tree-peony spring, might so be made immortal.

Li Po, brought drunk to court, took up his brush,

but washed his face among the lilies first,

then wrote the song of Lady Flying Swallow:

which Hsuang Sung, the emperor, forthwith played,

moving quick fingers on a flute of jade.

Who will forget that afternoon? Still, still,

the singer holds his phrase, the rising moon

remains unrisen. Even the fountain's falling blade

hangs in the air unbroken, and says: Wait!

VIII

Text into text, text out of text. Pretext

for scholars or for scholiasts. The living word

springs from the dying, as leaves in spring

spring from dead leaves, our birth from death.

And all is text, is holy text. Sheepfold Hill

becomes its name for us, anti yet is still

unnamed, unnamable, a book of trees

before it was a book for men or sheep,

before it was a book for words. Words, words,

for it is scarlet now, and brown, and red,

and yellow where the birches have not shed,

where, in another week, the rocks will show.

And in this marriage of text and thing how can we know

where most the meaning lies? We climb the hill

through bullbriar thicket and the wild rose, climb

past poverty-grass and the sweet-scented bay

scaring the pheasant from his wall, but can we say

that it is only these, through these, we climb,

or through the words, the cadence, and the rhyme?

Chang Hsu, calligrapher of great renown,

needed to put but his three cupfuls down

to tip his brush with lightning. On the scroll,

wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, the sky

opened upon Forever. Which is which?

The poem? Or the peachtree in the ditch?

Or is all one? Yes, all is text, the immortal text,

Sheepfold Hill the poem, the poem Sheepfold Hill,

and we, Li Po, the man who sings, sings as he climbs,

transposing rhymes to rocks and rocks to rhymes.

The man who sings. What is this man who sings?

And finds this dedicated use for breath

for phrase and periphrase of praise between

the twin indignities of birth and death?

Li Yung, the master of the epitaph,

forgetting about meaning, who himself

had added 'meaning' to the book of >things,'

lies who knows where, himself sans epitaph,

his text, too, lost, forever lost ...

And yet, no,

text lost and poet lost, these only flow

into that other text that knows no year.

The peachtree in the poem is still here.

The song is in the peachtree and the ear.

The winds of doctrine blow both ways at once.

The wetted finger feels the wind each way,

presaging plums from north, and snow from south.

The dust-wind whistles from the eastern sea

to dry the nectarine and parch the mouth.

The west wind from the desert wreathes the rain

too late to fill our wells, but soon enough,

the four-day rain that bears the leaves away.

Song with the wind will change, but is still song

and pierces to the rightness in the wrong

or makes the wrong a rightness, a delight.

Where are the eager guests that yesterday

thronged at the gate? Like leaves, they could not stay,

the winds of doctrine blew their minds away,

and we shall have no loving-cup tonight.

No loving-cup: for not ourselves are here

to entertain us in that outer year,

where, so they say, we see the Greater Earth.

The winds of doctrine blow our minds away,

and we are absent till another birth.

Beyond the Sugar Loaf, in the far wood,

under the four-day rain, gunshot is heard

and with the falling leaf the falling bird

flutters her crimson at the huntsman's foot.

Life looks down at death, death looks up at life,

the eyes exchange the secret under rain,

rain all the way from heaven: and all three

know and are known, share and are shared, a silent

moment of union and communion.

Have we come

this way before, and at some other time?

Is it the Wind Wheel Circle we have come?

We know the eye of death, and in it too

the eye of god, that closes as in sleep,

giving its light, giving its life, away:

clouding itself as consciousness from pain,

clouding itself, and then, the shutter shut.

And will this eye of god awake again?

Or is this what he loses, loses once,

but always loses, and forever lost?

It is the always and unredeemable cost

of his invention, his fatigue. The eye

closes, and no other takes its place.

It is the end of god, each time, each time.

Yet, though the leaves must fall, the galaxies

rattle, detach, and fall, each to his own

perplexed and individual death, Lady Yang

gone with the inkberry's vermilion stalk,

the peony face behind a fan of frost,

the blue-moon eyebrow behind a fan of rain,

beyond recall by any alchemist

or incantation from the Book of Change:

unresumable, as, on Sheepfold Hill,

the fir cone of a thousand years ago:

still, in the loving, and the saying so,

as when we name the hill, and, with the name,

bestow an essence, and a meaning, too:

do we endow them with our lives?

They move

into another orbit: into a time

not theirs: and we become the bell to speak

this time: as we become new eyes

with which they see, the voice

in which they find duration, short or long,

the chthonic and hermetic song.

Beyond Sheepfold Hill,

gunshot again, the bird flies forth to meet

predestined death, to look with conscious sight

into the eye of light

the light unflinching that understands and loves.

And Sheepfold Hill accepts them, and is still.

The landscape and the language are the same.

And we ourselves are language and are land,

together grew with Sheepfold Hill, rock, and hand,

and mind, all taking substance in a thought

wrought out of mystery: birdflight and air

predestined from the first to be a pair:

as, in the atom, the living rhyme

invented her divisions, which in time,

and in the terms of time, would make and break

the text, the texture, and then all remake.

This powerful mind that can by thinking take

the order of the world and all remake,

will it, for joy in breaking, break instead

its own deep thought that thought itself be dead?

Already in our coil of rock and hand,

hidden in the cloud of mind, burning, fading,

under the waters, in the eyes of sand,

was that which in its time would understand.

Already in the Kingdom of the Dead

the scrolls were waiting for the names and dates

and what would there irrevocably be said.

The brush was in the hand, the poem was in the love,

the praise was in the word. The 'Book of Lives'

listed the name, Li Po, as an Immortal;

and it was time to travel. Not, this year,

north to the Damask City, or the Gorge,

but, by the phoenix borne, swift as the wind,

to the Jade Palace Portal. There

look through the clouded to the clear

and there watch evil like a brush-stroke disappear

in the last perfect rhyme

of the begin-all-end-all poem, time.

XII

Northwest by north. The grasshopper weathervane

bares to the moon his golden breastplate, swings

in his predicted circle, gilded legs and wings

bright with frost, predicting frost. The tide

scales with moon-silver, floods the marsh, fulfils

Payne Creek and Quivett Creek, rises to lift

the fishing-boats against a jetty wall;

and past them floods the plankton and the weed

and limp sea-lettuce for the horseshoe crab

who sleeps till daybreak in his nest of reed.

The hour is open as the mind is open.

Closed as the mind is closed. Opens as the hand opens

to receive the ghostly snowflakes of the moon, closes

to feel the sunbeams of the bloodstream warm

our human inheritance of touch. The air tonight

brings back, to the all-remembering world, its ghosts,

borne from the Great Year on the Wind Wheel Circle.

On that invisible wave we lift, we too,

and drag at secret moorings,

stirred by the ancient currents that gave us birth.

And they are here, Li Po and all the others,

our fathers and our mothers: the dead leaf's footstep

touches the grass: those who were lost at sea

and those the innocents the too-soon dead:

all mankind

and all it ever knew is here in-gathered,

held in our hands, and in the wind

breathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill.

How still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting House

how still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this,

now long since dead, but then how young,

how young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frost

looked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heard

borne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word:

the father within him, the mother within him, the self

coming to self through love of each for each.

In this small mute democracy of stones

is it Abiel or Li Po who lies

and lends us against death our speech?

They are the same, and it is both who teach.

The poets and the prophecies are ours:

and these are with us as we turn, in turn,

the leaves of love that fill the Book of Change