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April is poetry month! Just thinking about it makes me recall wilder, grander (younger) times when I spent my life carousing with poets, drinking infinite goblets of wine and talking all night about the great unfathomable mysteries of life and love. Those days are gone, those friends have all vanished to wherever poets go, and the great mysteries remain unsolved (of course). Yet, anon, it is spring once again. There is a cold breeze blowing clouds across the white moon. The garden is empty and dead, but the buds are starting to form on the cherry tree.
To celebrate these wistful memories and to celebrate the eternal art of poetry here is a very short poem by the original drunk master, Li Po, a roving carouser famous for descriptions of the natural world combined with intimations of otherworldly knowledge. This poem is a good example–and a good spring poem. The Chinese original is probably filled with cunning homonyms and allusions of which I am ignorant (at this point, everyone might be ignorant of some of them…Li Po lived in the Tang Dynasty from 701 AD to 762 AD). But it seems like Jasper Mountain is an allusion to the court intrigues of the capital. It also helps to know that peach blossoms are associated with celestial/fairy folk not unlike the Ae Sidhe. Enough prose, here is Arthur Copper’s translation of Li Po’s succinct masterpiece:
IN THE MOUNTAINS: A REPLY TO THE VULGAR
They ask me where’s the sense
on Jasper Mountain?
I laugh and don’t reply,
in heart’s own quiet:
Peach petals float their streams
away in secret
To other skies and earths
than those of mortals.
ferrebeekeeper 