For Shi-te
Remembering Shi-te’s counsel
Always to sit to a good table
And be joyous over wine
Among trusted friends,
Han-Shan goes now wherever
Men practice being men.
Among his itineraries,
He likes best the annual
Sharpening of knives:
The whine of good steel
Laid against wet whetstones,
Waterdrops flung into high air,
And the edged blades turned
Out in interjacent rows
Upon the new grass.
“Soon,”
He says, “farthest corners
Of fields will be tonsured
To manly precision, bared
Footpaths will run like naked
Veins on sleeveless forearms,
And once-veiled islands will rise
Like headlands in leveled seas.”
Thinking of what is to come,
He hears an unassignable music,
Small as wind, blowing among
Lemon trees in Imperial gardens.
Frequenting the mule markets,
He assesses the merits
Of each beast without pricing one.
The long ears please him,
The look of patient wisdom:
Anomaly among anomalous kingdoms.
At the rock-quarry pit,
Perhaps for the hundredth time,
Looking down from the dizzying heights,
He observes quartzite gleaming
From shaven walls, and men at work
Like dusty bees in the frenzied
Maze and fretwork of an open hive.
Yet, he tells no one his name
Nor where he lives in a suburb
Of similar government houses.
No postman knocks at his door;
His gatepost goes unnumbered.
Sometimes at night when,
Somewhere along a nameless street,
A violin has cried itself to sleep,
And all lights are out,
Han-Shan, Old Ronyon, as he
Innominates himself now,
Stands at an open window,
Applauding the whey-faced moon.
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