Meng Haoran

Meng Haoran (Meng Hao-jan) was a High Tang poet who, unlike most of his peers, wasn’t a bureaucrat. I don’t know what he did for money. I don’t know much about him at all, in fact, other than he lived somewhere along the Han River and spent most of his life wandering among the mountains writing poems about the infinite that I read stretched out on my couch after a glass of wine, repetitions of words like gibbons, clouds, plums, frost, rain, grass, and dew creating brief moments where I forgot where I was or found myself on the dozy border of another world.

Road-weary, giving the horse a break,
I find myself gazing at Ju River dikes.

The Lo River is open now, free of snow.
On Sung peaks, twilight clouds linger,

trailed halfway across empty skies, lit
colors surging elemental and swelling.

I’m sending here this moment of itself—
how it just keeps unfurling, and unfurling.

You polish words in rue-scented libraries,
and I live in bamboo-leaf gardens, a recluse

wandering each day the same winding path
home to rest in the quiet, no noise anywhere.

A bird soaring the heights chooses its tree,
but the hedge soon tangles impetuous goats.

Today, things seen becoming thoughts felt:
this is where you start forgetting the words.

In a crystalline radiance of day’s last light,
I frolic along river shallows, paddle light,

then enchanted by water creatures, drift
all effortless ease across their clear depths.

A white-haired man trailing a fish hook,
a girl rinsing gauze clean, makeup fresh:

we gaze and gaze, a recognition swelling,
a pulsing blush, then can’t find the words.

In spring sleep, dawn arrives unnoticed.
Suddenly, all around, I hear birds in song.

A loud night. Wind and rain came, tearing
blossoms down. Who knows few or many?