AT THE FOOT OF MOUNT TAI

In the tent by the foot of Mount Tai, you composed

The Pisan Cantos

. Beside its slopes

Confucius must have come to you.

Spring and Autumn period had no righteous wars.

Mussolini counted for nothing.

No greater good than amending one’s faults.

A dragon of treason, caged in a camp,

your ape’s roost all iron-boughed.

Pangde

,龐德,your family name, a dragon in its first character

coiled beneath chang,厂, a lean-to, sheltering rock.

In your cage, clouds, wind, rain and dew for housemates;

spiders, lizards, wasps your accompanists.

White ox past the camp, sunlight past jail gloom,

birds on the phone wires, stepping to some tune.

Practice and learn—the Chinese

xi

,習,

spread in your eyes its white wings of time,

soaring image of the east, ideogram of the west,

this beguiling error a whole new hermeneutics.

At last in a tent, your cot, your pages,

one Chinese dictionary and the

Shujing

.

On a desk of cobbled crates

you wrought poems from deep memory,

like Dante, hell to heaven.

Erudite as the Argentine librarian, lines

strive like ten mouths chanting rounds:

dazzling, deluding, chunks of green jade sewn to a gold-stitched robe,

in your heart the poet’s ceaseless ramble.

Pangde

your family name, the radical of

de

being

chi

,彳,

for walking: a poet pacing the intersection,

ten scowling eyes to see the world,

your golden mean in homage to the

Dao

,

Eden raised on earth.

From far off, apricot blossoms drift onto your shoulders.

Without Confucius, would your shirt have opened to the left?

At the peak of the tallest mountain, its pure crown,

what whiteness could we add?