Watch Out for the Trap

“Once you’ve got the meaning, then you can forget the words”

So, there was a noted sage

Who said remarkable things,

Many of which were preserved.

Anyway, one day the sage

Put a weir in the river.

He waited, then hauled it out.

“Just what I wanted!” he said.

“I caught a fish for dinner.”

He tossed the weir in the weeds.

He walked off with his dead fish,

Whistling cheerfully. “But Sage!”

One of his entourage called.

“You left your trap in the grass!”

“I don’t need it,” laughed the sage.

“I’ve got my fish for dinner.

Once you have the fish, you don’t

Have any need of the trap.”

And he strolled off happily.

“But Sage!” called his devotee.

“Won’t you want to catch more fish?”

“One fish trap!” the sage yelled back.

The devotee felt stupid,

While another follower

Rushed to write this wisdom down.

Much later, a fisherman

Found the weir. Since then, he sells

Sage and followers his catch.

Sweet

I was surprised by a large, luxurious skunk

This morning near the edge of the cliff.

Fortunately, I did not, in turn, surprise it.

I watched it foraging intently, sniffing,

Repeatedly shifting direction in the scrub,

Ignoring, it seemed, its precariousness

On a boulder hanging over the sheer cliff.

Wrens sang. Breezes made music of oaks.

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

Wandered through my awareness, poets

Dead not long before I knew their names,

Poets who wrote for each other. “Skunk

Hour, for Elizabeth Bishop,” for instance.

I will be dead myself, I think, long before

Anyone composes skunk poems for me.

Poor me. Alone on a stone with small birds

Singing to deep, sweet canyons of pines,

Watching an insouciant mustelid forage—

Who may not, geneticists suggest, belong

With all those weasels, otters, badgers, minks,

And wolverines, but alone, the sole Mephitid.

Natives and Barbarians

As soon as sedentary

Peoples first sat down, they found

Themselves centered, surrounded

By the whirl of the mobile

Peoples they no longer were,

Nomadic barbarians

Who threatened them and native

Foragers whom they threatened.

Why sit down in the first place?

Plenty to read about that,

Not a lot of consensus.

But we’re more interested here

In that vulnerable sense

Of confinement to a dot,

Which, being surrounded, must

Be at the center of things.

The dots grew and merged, although

They also sometimes collapsed,

Harried by barbarians

Pillaging and extorting,

But encroaching on natives,

Settling and clearing more land,

Until civilization

Clearly had the upper hand.

The process, on modern maps,

Or, better, animated

As information graphics,

Looks a lot like a culture

Captured in a Petri dish,

Blooming into the corners.

Are we less vulnerable,

Now, we who are all that’s left?

It’s hard to be the center

Of a world without edges,

Surrounded by emptiness,

Only nothing invading,

Only nothing left to take,

Everyone sitting around

Dreaming of being native,

Dreaming of barbarians

When no such people exist,

Except within where we sit.

Circular Entry

Something about the wound, clearly
Was playing a role, promoting

The tumor to grow and evade
Being destroyed by the patrols.

Can we pause to think about this?
We use metaphors of people

Playing roles in societies,
Interacting with each other,

To explain our understanding
Of how our bodies live and die,

And use metaphors of disease
And recovery in the flesh

To explain our understanding
Of how societies collapse.

We’ve been doing so centuries
And centuries—so which is it?

Which is source and which is target?
Does either explain the other?

Rogue cells, cancers, secret police—
Something about our wounds, clearly.

In the Shade of the Great Tree, Dianpei

The tree looks like a question mark,
Like it’s scrutinizing the ground,
Like it’s tired and wants to sit down,

Like it’s done with ruinous ways,
Like it’s tilting its puzzled crown,
Like it’s gesturing to hermits

To come and relax in its shade,
To evade the heat of the day.
The great tree is dead. It will wait.

And Your Sparse, White Hair, Du Fu

In a half-cracked country, not all mountains
Remain intact, and as for these rivers—
Drained, dammed, rerouted—it’s a miracle

Of sorts any water gets to the sea—
And the coasts have other problems, of course,
And the seas, if anything, are rising.

Fires burn, here and there, but if they’re beacons,
They’re not intentionally signaling.
And yet. It’s truth, with modification—

Even in this broken country, mountains
And rivers remain. That’s the scene this spring,
Season of disease and conspiracies,

Season of riots and increasing heat.
A bird startled me, and my pulse quickened.
When it shrilled in my ear, I thought of you . . .

Long

Juniper down, moon flower
Coming up under it. Dawn.

Live with a word long enough,
You’ll find it means everything.