No Idea (D-S5)
Whatever peace I had,
my friend has long since
boiled away.
I’m blind drunk
and reeling like a man
who stared too long at the sun.
I can’t tell the cup
from the wine from
the saaghi – they’re all
the same to me,
I’m so in love.
What I am
I have no idea,
or what I was before
I was,
what anybody was –
what we were before
we were
escapes me too.
I don’t know, even,
if I want to sober up.
I was carried, pushed and pulled here
on a web of roads I can’t remember
now, and never knew the reason.
I haven’t come to cause confusion –
this isn’t nonsense – I’m trying
to distinguish details.
I’ll keep calling Hu from here until I die.
“What is ‘life’?” I say, and
“What is ‘honor’? What’s ‘disgrace’?”
I’ll tend this garden ’til I die
and revel in the work.
That’s why I’m here.
Not to close the festival down.
If love’s a scandal,
what is it then, that holds
us all together, top to bottom?
I haven’t come to make this world my home –
I’m on my way to where I came from,
nowhere. Drunk I came and drunk I got,
and drunk I’ll go,
so soused
I can’t tell sweet from cyanide.
I haven’t come to sniff out every aster,
rose and meadow blossom one by one,
but be a nightingale to one enormous flower –
goldenrod, a form of sunlight,
maybe Queen Anne’s lace, a moonlight –
all one flower.
The gardener roars in vain
at the loss of a single blossom.
The nightingale, completely free,
illuminates the summer-yellow
field of flower
whole
with music.
I haven’t come to brood and sob.
I play my tar and sing.
Music’s my
intelligence, too bright to bear
the weight of sorrow.
“What is ‘sadness’?” Ma’zun asks.
“And what is ‘grief’?”
