Answers To Tang Compadres

** We have wandered for years In the forest of motives Some explored the pathways Some lay in wait for others At last I'm lying back immersed In what I have come through ** Cold has pierced our hearts We have made nature sympathize with us We learn to spell out pity in trampled petals ** Half of Du Fu's friends are ghosts So what does that make him? His boat is tethered to a garden full of them He floats downriver trailing a fogbank ** War has devastated the Shaanxi fields So they are covered by unbroken green Clouds of trouble run before the wind Birds get lost in the distance All of this stirs in Du Fu's chest ** Why does that beauty lean against bamboo? Isn't that better than leaning on a doorway! It is hard to get support from bamboo But she endorses that slender stem The way Michael Jordan endorses Nikes ** Du Fu dreamed of sharing a hermitage with Li Bai They would take immortal medicine together Make their tree of poetry grow beyond this world Du Fu admired the mountain priest The wild swordsman of his youth Even after Li Bai went in for banqueting And when they met to talk poetry Something still vibrated from gut to gut This was good for inspiration But Du Fu had great love for this world He could only show it through his family ** A disturbing presence to welcome in one's dream: This man whose soul was haggard with care Who died where friends could not bury him But the two men had knit their souls together Their words were crucibles for each other So the friend who outlived the other Had to sum up their loss and gain ** Shengdai- -the 'sagely reign' Was a word for that golden age Used by people who lived in it That was before their cosmopolitan era Was shattered by rebellions Now that once-proud phrase comes to light Flung into unlikely corners Such as the name of a pretty Japanese girl ** I've heard that some people arrived at fame in the capital A hermitage on Zhongnan Mountain was their short-cut What a joke! That mountain is piled with human bones ** Wang Wei tells of an old man Leaning against his cane He measures hours of waning light Waiting for a herd boy to come home Wang Wei himself is the old man Waiting for a madman to sing Needing something to look forward to ** Dream of a beautiful girl among the mulberries But seeing how she was selected for the harem Took the edge off of Wang Wei's fantasy ** Above the tower of brick The unseen crystalline tower continues upward Once the trees are reduced to green velvet What experiment can a poet try? ** A troubadour strides across the landscape of history He has heard a new summons to worship Sounded from the bell of a woman's dress But he grew up sword fighting with other horsemen Now he cannot stop trying to impress them ** I am the cup he poured his wine into Words he spoke get written in my poems Low cloud and valley mist make one mist ** Path of words to a mountain hut A window-scene of rainy pines Where his absence is embedded Our loneliness goes to pay a visit Along words designed to omit him ** We borrow geese as a figure of distant flight Then continue leading the life left behind We rarely visit the remote shores Where geese can safely rest their wings Yet our drama needs to imagine them ** The old hermits went to a place Where we revisit their quietness Among plants that keep growing But you trust your seclusion to a media screen I hope the plug to cyberspace is never pulled Otherwise, what space will ever remember you? ** The poets of our network Look earthward for their open space Their panorama is access to other hearts They ride the currents of human feeling The way an eagle rides an updraft ** This is a party of immortals Each one looks off into a different distance Where they have pledged to join each other In a party of immortals