Iron Mountain. Mark FrutkinЧитать онлайн книгу.
one moves.
Night comes.
The iron mountain towers above us
robed in mist, its crags
reach through the clouds into heaven,
a single white waterfall seems
to thread down from the sky
in steps and fragments
and, like the trail behind us,
disappears the way we have come.
I see my lieutenant ahead
alone on his horse.
He reminds me of myself.
Though I am the greatest Emperor
the world has ever known,
the mountain towering above
was here before I came,
will remain when I have gone.
The first heavy rain will obliterate
our footprints and any sign of our passing.
In ten springs, a hundred, a thousand,
this path will remain the signature
of a traveller unknown, and the mist
will continue to swirl and dissipate
like poems breathed on air.
Like the mountains that sweep before us,
fragmented and overlapping,
our world is in chaos.
My failure to bring order to my world
stings me and causes me distress.
I am the Emperor,
yet the world is an avalanche of sorrows
and I can do nothing.
Long ago I gave up searching
yet I ride on.
I take my ease in a poor man’s hut.
How is it my heart is soothed
by the sight of two wooden buckets
resting side by side in the doorway?
5. The Emperor Comes to the River
I have come through a storm
of mountains to find d9eGuan Yin,* high peaks and low valleys, my heart torn and contorted as the concatenation of cliffs, the constant rupture of planes.
All the streams have dissolved in the river,
twisted down from the mountains
and dissolved in the river.
The water flows without obstruction
like thoughts with no one attached to them.
*Goddess of Compassion
It begins and ends with a mountain.
A waterfall chatters down its face
turns to a whispering brook
widens, flattens into a slow river
resolves into a calm lake
where the mountain melts
in its pure reflection.
Mountains so high
it is impossible to distinguish
what is mountain, what is cloud.
In the pavilion
at the mountain’s foot,
a lute
wrapped in brocade
woven to the sound
of the lute’s music,
depicting a scene
of mountains and cloud,
and a lute in a pavilion,
wrapped in brocade.
Wang Meng’s painting “Reading in Spring Mountains”
A circular stamp above the mountains,
the Chinese character for moonlight.
Cursive tree branches tell stories
of prevailing winds, dry summers, long deep winters.
The creases of the mountains
cut tales deep into the memory of the earth.
Clouds brush themselves into wavering ideograms,
and dissolve like secret writing hidden in the skies.
A poem Written on “Hall of Clear Mind” Paper
Paper is the most humble of the Four Treasures: paper, brush, ink, inkstone.
Slight breeze across the page.
Not much to say.
No mountain. No storm.
Cherish the earth.
Cherish the paper,
the trees this is written in
as wind, invisible ink,
weaves among branches.
Nothing much happens.
Only the effect is visible.
for Richard Gravel
The Emperor sits on his throne
at the centre of his palace.
Retinues of servants and messengers
come and go with unrelieved persistence,
but he is alone, always alone.
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