THE BLUE NOTEBOOK

Cave dust, blue mold
stains my verse.
Born of so many Sundays —
Peaceful and terse.

These poems, as animals, quickly grew
by the snow's cold baptized
in the frigid dark, in the marshy damp.
And after all they survived.

Of ancestors they do not boast,
For heirs not a care.
Theirs is only the granite cell
Through the years unaware.

Now, by a birdsong aroused
Not a nightingale in call alone,
But a scream, always of dreams
From the comfort of forest and stone.

Forgive me these analogies
Anyone who knows this life of mine,
knows from zoology it is derived
with sanity always on the line.
                     
*     *     *

Frail, lonely and naked,
without firelight blind.
In a lilac, polar gloom
I am confined.

To the pale darkness I entrust
my poems all.
No longer on my mind
sins large and small.

With lungs torn by cold
with a mouth sealed tight.
With teardrops like stones
with sweat frozen white.

I speak these poems,
I cry them out unbade.
Trees and pebbles, the deaf,
little by little more afraid.

From far mountains the tiny echo
I listen for,
and hearing it my chest fills easily
I breathe once more.

*    *    *

Do not judge us too severely.
Better to be merciful.
Our way we will find,
A path narrow but defined.

Along the cliffs go musk deer
Let's go above those clouds,
Hand in hand up to where it is clear,
Poetry we need, a bridge made aloud.

These verses we build
now solid and true.
Though they sway in the wind,
once they were flimsy all through.

Stepping out onto the wobbly bridge,
Pledging only this book we make,
Whatever the envy or anger,
Will not us to Heaven take.

*    *    *

A timid imagination,
Come up here to me.
Cope with the dizziness,
After all, it's not easy.

Awaiting you unfamiliar words
But at the mountain's base,
That land — it's only foundation,
We've long known that place.

From here one can further see,
The widest sight . . .
How the plains offend me,
This — the mountain's birthright.