Thinking out
of the heart–

it’s up,
it’s down. . .

It’s that time
of day light

echoes the sun
setting west

over mountains.
I want to come home.

The clouds passing over, the
wisps still seeming substantial, as
a kid, as a kid I’d see them up there

in the town I grew up in on the hills
in the fields on the way home then
as now still up there, still up there.

It is worthless to write a line
if the song proceed not from the heart
nor can the song come from the heart
if there is no love in it.

Maligning fools, failing all else, brag,
but love does not spoil,
but countered by love, fills,
fulfilling grows firm.
A fool’s love is like verse poor in the making,
only appearances and the name having,
for it loves nothing except itself, can
take nothing of good,
corrupts the rhyme.

And their singing is not worth a dime
whose song comes not from the heart.
If love has not set his roots there
the song cannot put forth shoots there: so
my song is superior, for I turn to it
mouth eyes mind heart
and there is the joy of love in it.
And the binding glance is food for it
and the barter of sighs is food for it
and…

I sit up with a scroll of your poems, reading before a lamp.
When I’m done, the lamp’s flickering low and dawn’s far off.

My eyes ache. I put out the lamp and sit in the dark. Waves
blown by headwinds: the sound of them slapping at the boat.

translated by David Hinton

In the rain, the lonesome
dog idiosyn-
cratically, with each
quadribeat, throws

out the left fore-
foot beyond
the right intent, in
his stride,

on some obscure
insistence–from bridge-
ward going
into new territory.