Hangzhou, Lake of the Poets

MORNING Reading the bones, wetting a fingertip to trace archaic characters, I feel a breeze of silence flow up past my wrist, icy. Can I speak here? The bones say I must. As the first light strikes across the lake, magpies scream, and the cast bones say the work must come true, it’s been true all along, we are what we do out on our digs. Dictor and looker, all eyes, with spade and a jeweler’s loupe I sift mud & dust for bone, for shellcast. Spy, archeologist of freshness, I expect sight-made-sound to reveal fear cold at the throat of change, and loosen its grip so that mind, riding the bloodwarm stream, wells up as the speech that bears it and is telling. EVENING Magpies scream. Though the tongues of birds say Now and warn forward, free of a live past, we seek back and forth for change, the ghostly sparkling of our watertable under everywhere. If I don’t speak to tap & ease it out, I go dry & dumb & will die wicked. On the lake of the poets a stone lamp flickers. It casts eight moons dancing, casting doubt on the moon that rides above the winter air. Ice thaws in a poet’s throat; the springing truth is fresh. It wakes taste. The taste lasts. Language floods the mud; mind makes a cast of words; it precipitates, mercurial, like T’ang discourse riding the tidal constant of its source.