Answers To Tang Compadres Poem by Denis Mair

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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

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Cold has pierced our hearts
We have made nature sympathize with us
We learn to spell out pity in trampled petals

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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