1st Sonnet To Christina Poem by James Mullaney

Three Ming vases rusticate in a ring.
I choose one, for its simple garden scene
razes my poems to rice grass. Cardinals sing;
a beanpole fronts a lean-to; flutes flash clean.
Fishermen in a horizonless haze
apostrophize the ancestral spirits
who tramp the mountains and the forest ways.
The noontide turns. An urchin child near its
dharma guardian answers slights to newts
and skinks, but shuns the cross-eyed billygoat.
Tacking east, across dreamscape river routes,
vase painting glides the Ming by sampan boat,
where once we two, Christina Ladylove,
mulled a blushing maple moon, balmed thereof.