Li Po at the Edge of the Yellow River*
(Dedicated to all college students during finals week)
What I need are the idea of air, the essence of water, and the reality of flower. Everything is painfully real and I can feel again. Life is all but fleeting.
Music of flutes and guitars, strings and winds, percussive raindrops.
I feel the love of a thousand dead.
What is here is but a wind that impersonates…
And what alluring music from the eternal grave?
Life is calling me to go to its final moments, even though I leave a thousand things undone.
Why haven’t I noticed music before, the music in the wind through the bamboo grove?
Why haven’t I noticed the tingling in my fingertips, my quivering lips, and my undulating hips
that love here resides before I die, surely as I will die…
Wash over me, tow me to distant shores, water of the ages, water that swell my heart,
water that cleanses, water that I hope would do even more…
*Li Po threw himself into the Yellow River “to embrace the moon” and thus drowned circa 700 A.D.
Koon Woon
October 31, 2010
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