Question and Answer on the Mountain

You ask for what reason I stay on the green mountain,
I smile, but do not answer, my heart is at leisure.
Peach blossom is carried far off by flowing water,
Apart, I have heaven and earth in the human world.

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by Li Bai, 740 AD

Dancers Exercising

Frame within frame, the evolving conversation
is dancelike, as though two could play
at improvising snowflakes'
six-feather-vaned evanescence,
no two ever alike. All process
and no arrival: the happier we are,
the less there is for memory to take hold of,
or - memory being so large a predilection
for the exceptional - come to a halt
in front of. But finding, one evening
on a street not quite familiar,
inside a gated
November-sodden garden, a building
of uncertain provenance,
peering into whose vestibule we were
arrested - a frame within a frame,
a lozenge of impeccable clarity -
by the reflection, no, not
of our two selves, but of
dancers exercising in a mirror,
at the center
of that clarity, what we saw
was not stillness
but movement: the perfection
of memory consisting, it would seem,
in the never-to-be-completed.
We saw them mirroring themselves,
never guessing the vestibule
that defined them, frame within frame,
contained two other mirrors.

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by Amy Clampitt, 1997

A Calling

Over my desk Georgia O'Keefe says
I have no theories to offer and then
takes refuge in the disembodied
third person singular: One works
I suppose because it is the most
interesting thing one knows to do.
O Georgia! Sashaying between
first base and shortstop as it were
drawing up a list of all the things
one imagines one has to do...
You get the garden planted. You
take the dog to the vet. You
certainly have to do the shopping.

Syntax, like sex, is intimate.
One doesn't lightly leap from person
to person. The painting, you said,
is like a thread that runs
through all the reasons for all the other
things that make one's life.
O awkward invisible third person,
come out, stand up, be heard!
Poetry is like farming. It's
a calling, it needs constancy,
the deep woods drumming of the grouse,
and long life, like Georgia's, who
is talking to one, talking to me,
talking to you.

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by Maxine Kumin, 1986

Night Morning

To translate a poem
from thinking
into English
takes all night
night    nights and days

English does
the best it can   while
the mother's tongue    Russian
omits the verb to be
again and again and
is always interfering
with the excited in-
dustrious brain    wisely
the heart's beat asserts
control

also the newest English
argues with its old
singing ancestry
it thinks it knows best

finally    the night's
hard labor peers through
the morning window    observes

snow    birds    the sun caught
in white and black winter
birches   disentangles itself
addresses the ice-cold meadow
for hours on the beauty of
the color green

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by Grace Paley, 2008

Staying at Ed's Place

I like being in your apartment, and not disturbing anything.
As in the woods I wouldn't want to move a tree,
or change the play of sun and shadow on the ground.

The yellow kitchen stool belongs right there
against white plaster. I haven't used your purple towel
because I like the accidental cleft of shade you left in it.

At your small six-sided table, covered with mysterious
dents in the wood like a dartboard, I drink my coffee
from your brown mug. I look into the clearing

of your high front room, where sunlight slopes through bare
window squares. Your Afghanistan hammock,
    a man-sized cocoon
slung from wall to wall, your narrow desk and typewriter

are the only furniture. Each morning your light from the east
douses me where, with folded legs, I sit in your meadow,
a casual spread of brilliant carpets. Like a cat or dog

I take a roll, then, stretched out flat
in the center of color and pattern, I listen
to the remote growl of trucks over cobbles on
    Bethune Street below.

When I open my eyes I discover the peaceful blank
of the ceiling. It's old paint-layered surface is moonwhite
and trackless, like the Sea - of Tranquility.

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by May Swenson, 1975