Orchids and Eagles, and: After a Sung Dynasty Scroll by Hsiao Chio, and: The Return of the Hunters, and: The Kitchen Bird, and: The Island without Tourists, and: Just Once, and: Waiting for the Alchemist

Orchids and Eagles, and: After a Sung Dynasty Scroll by Hsiao Chio, and: The Return of the Hunters, and: The Kitchen Bird, and: The Island without Tourists, and: Just Once, and: Waiting for the Alchemist

Orchids and Eagles

Something happened to the cables
that run under miles of water to our island,
so we play cribbage in the light of six candles
and a hurricane lamp.

I look up from my cards. In the black window opposite,
the assortment of candles and the lamp float in the glass,
and I am back in the dining room of a hotel
in Morelia.

Tall white candles and white orchids float in a wall
of wood-framed windows above the valley,
mingled with pricks of light from the old city—
images that have not risen to mind for thirty years.

What is memory? Praise it. Praise its strings and loops
of orchids floating in the night above the old Mexican town—
and yesterday—that pair of eagles, drifting,
floating above the island, dallying with the wind.

After a Sung Dynasty Scroll by Hsiao Chio

The great crag fills the sky.
Three waterfalls drop from cliffs without a sound.
Trails wind through trees. They ascend,
disappear, and reappear. A placid

river flows at the mountain's base, where a servant
ties a flat-bottomed boat to a landing.
He has ferried over a pair of sages,
with their topknots and dark crimson robes.
They talk about The Mandate of Heaven
and read their poems to each other.

Near the summit, temple buildings, their roofs curved up
like wings, stand half hidden behind walls and groves of pine.
Has the boatman ferried the men past the world's edge?
Is this the country beyond death?

The Return of the Hunters

after the painting by Brueghel

They enter the scene under a gray, mottled sky
with their dogs. They have reached the crest
of a snowy hill above their village
after a day of hard slogging.
Dark birds brood on iron-cold branches.
Below, skaters thrust and turn on a frozen pond.
How many times have I looked at this translation
of a world and failed to notice the hunters' game bags
are empty? Even the dogs are dejected.
Winter will be endless.

The Kitchen Bird

Above our stove a Persian bird
flies on a Persian tile
in a surround of stalks and flowers,
some blue like his wings,
some like his breast cinnamon-rose.
His beak is open; he stares straight up.
This is the way he greets each morning.
Singing.

The Island without Tourists

Vinalhaven, Maine

1

Late September. No more sunsets of lavender,
pale green, rose, soft gray. The west
red-orange like a furnace.

No lights from neighboring houses.
The full moon bright enough to turn the islet
below, each pointed spruce,
upside down in the flat-calm bay.

2

Bright morning. Wind rushes in treetops.
aerial surf swoops, roughs my hair,
sizzles in my ears.

My own sound in the mix—
big shoes on gravel.
It's all music.

Just Once

I have never seen my father
in a dream.
He died when I was five.
A scrap of memory washed
in browns and grays
is all I retain.

If I could see him just once
in my night theater,
what would he say
to his second son
at last?

Waiting for the Alchemist

The October sun fires late chrysanthemums,
garnet, lavender, bright yellow.
It strikes an antique dollhouse set down
on the stump of an elm.
A wicker bell tolls.

In my back garden at five in the afternoon,
my shadow's a hundred feet long.
If I squint sidewise, just so, at the white sun
on a day like this,
I might uncover the philosopher's stone...