Du Fu Visits Anne Yun

A Fantasy for Anne Yun The moon tonight is the color of drenched carnations. The magpies flap and chatter briefly when candles are lit, dispelling early evening shadows, creating a pool of creamy illumination. Such is the reality of my place in time as I greet you, Anne Yun, in your reality. I am your honored ancestor, you are my beloved progeny. I am so grateful you remember me as a poet and scholar, and not that weary wanderer of endless, dust-clouded frontier roads, an imperial messenger delivering countless letters from countless imperial courtiers to obedient soldiers in countless camps. I have no thirst for victory or power. I have no stake in military glory. Still it is for these things I live and work. I have a genius for friendship, but I am always saying good-bye to friends. I have a longing for family life, but my wife weeps and ages alone, and I have never seen my youngest daughter. Tell me, was my life not a useful life, a life lived for others? Did I not serve faithfully the army that faithfully defended our borders and passed forward through time this magnificent land for you and your contemporaries? When I think of you, your lives in a prosperity I never knew, in a peace I never enjoyed, I am content and sleep an ancestral sleep of fulfilled dreams. And tonight all my dreams are focused on you, Anne Yun, my descendant, my distant daughter. You carry within the ancient impulse to write poems. How do your poems reach me? I do not know. They do not arrive as words written in graceful calligraphy on precious parchment. They are a presence, rather than things. Sometimes I know them as as a perfume which sweetens the air, whose essence I breathe in and out with pleasure. Other times your poems appear in the fumes of of southern wine, and I drink deeply of its inspiration. On a few occasions, I have heard one of your poems recited by a soldier at a camp fire, and his comrades are quiet and composed... The last time I saw Li Bai was a night of gentle beauty. The autumn air was criss-crossed by warm and cool breezes. The sky was stretched across the dome of heaven like an immense roll of silk. The silence gave way to songs sung by youths and maidens. I complained about the injustice of our lives. Li Bai smiled and poured more wine. 'My friend, we may be just madmen aging into more madness, or maybe the moon will flood us with wisdom, and we will be both mad and wise at the same time. Let others sort out the good and evil of things. I hope our children will prosper in a future happiness we cannot even imagine. But I will imagine our faraway children as creative, and productive, and fulfilled.' That was Li Bai's legacy to me, and now I pass it on to you.