Five Spring Poems from Po Chu-I
Visiting Yuan Chen with Li and Yu
Dreamed of Ch'ang-an,
Faces of old friends,
Li, Yu, and I,
Wandering hand-in-hand...
Came to Place of Serenity,
Yuan Chen's gate, we stopped
And hitched our steeds.
Sitting alone, Yuan Chen
Saw me, smiled, pointed
At flowers in Western Court,
Opened the wine.
Said, we haven't changed.
Joy's fleeting, our meeting
With no time for hellos...
Awake. Are they
still here?
Freeing the Birds
Sun over river,
Water-birds shrieking,
Wild ducks, geese, gulls, herons,
Sport in the sunbeams.
Once came a dealer in chickens
Bought in a distant town—
water-birds soaring,
chickens locked in a cage.
Fourteen chickens clucking, stuffed
in the same basket,
Spurs cut, legs in pain, heads exhausted,
Combs limp. Not dead yet, but starved
And thirsty, no food since early morning,
The butcher's shop by noon.
The way of the Old Masters includes
fish and pigs too,
This I have always followed.
These chickens brought this to heart.
So I bought them, and turned them
Loose in the Buddha's Garden.
Baldness
Dawn to dusk, dusk to dawn,
Hairs fell and fell,
How I dreaded the end!
Now all gone,
I don't care.
No more washing it, drying it,
No top-knot weighing me down.
No messy cloth-wrappings,
dusty tasselled fringe.
From a silver jar a cold stream
Trickles on my bald pate,
Like baptized with Buddha's Law,
such cool joy!
Now I know why a priest,
seeking peace,
shaves his head.
At the Temple
Crane on shore,
Moon through door,
Charming site,
Stayed two nights.
Glad-found quiet place,
No companions to drag me away.
Having sampled aloneness,
No more cronies for me!
Me
White beard, red face,
Each moment a hundred years;
Head spinning
everything's vague.
A hermit, sick and thin,
This crazy old drunkard
Still walks and sings!
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
October, 2009
Poems
Joel Weishaus tranlates Five Spring Poems by Po Chu-I
Joel Weishaus was born in New York. He edited On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing, (City Lights Books). His translation of the Ch'an Buddhist Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Block Prints by Arthur Okamura, was published by the Cranium Press, San Francisco. After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, he edited Thomas Merton's Woods, Shore, Desert (Museum of New Mexico Press). He became an adjunct curator at the University of New Mexico's Fine Arts Museum, Albuquerque, and a Writer-in-Residence at UNM's Center for Southwest Research. His most recent book is "The Healing Spirit of Haiku," co-authored with David Rosen and illustrated by Arthur Okamura (North Atlantic Books, 2004). His home page is http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282, or see the on-line archive at the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/.
The translations here are from Feels Like Home Again: Collected Poems 1962-2002.