Reading a translation of a fifteen-hundred year old monk's
Grandly pious and politically shrewd account of wandering, I saw
There are gods of the mountains in the mind that imagines.
There are neither gods nor mountains outside of imagination,
Nor imagination outside of any mind at all, although imagination,
Like its gods and mountains, also has no need of any one mind at all.
These were the sorts of thoughts imagination provided a mind
It inhabited that happened to know, waiting for the local shadows
Of the mountains and their gods to finally fall, these rivulets of sand
Between exposed roots of the half-dead cottonwood trees were called
By some forms of thinking a dry wash, with water somewhere below,
By some a wadi, and by others, in other scriptures, a naal.
And the good of all this translating, reading, and imagining was what
In a world where the universe kept nonexistence to itself,
Where water fell a killer flood of tomorrow's empty wash,
So similar to another imagination as to seem unchanged,
When water came with sand and logs and tumbled
Stones when water fell at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment