100 CHINESE POEMS AND THE WIZARD HENRY JAMES

To all to whom these presents come: Greetings! The world here is filled with snow and allegedly soon to be filled also with sleet, rain, darkness, vermin, cattle-disease and hot and cold running frogs. I assume by now you have settled the question of whether you exist; whatever you decided, you are welcome.

Two poems:

100 POEMS FROM THE CHINESE

The book is aged but not old as books go,

Four years my junior, but it has lived hard.

A librarian cut the dust jacket in pieces,

Put plastic over them and rebuilt it. 

The glue has brittled, forgetting to be glue.

Another librarian made repairs with tape

Which has turned pale brown but tries,

In a few spots, to do its job still.

A book once my father’s, now become mine;

Filled with urgent messages.

Tu Fu is not happy. He pawns his clothes

And buys wine. Chu Hsi has gone

On the Day of Cold Food to watch flowers

On the river bank.  Ou Yang Hsiu misses

His friend, the poet Tsu Mei, who died young;

Lu Yu asks if I know the tousled old man

Who, on days when he is not too drunk,

Sells wildflowers by the South Gate.

                        ********

THE MASTER

“His [Henry James’] skin was dark, his face very clear cut, his brow domed and bare. His eyes were singularly penetrating, dark and a little prominent. On their account he was regarded by the neighborhood poor as having the qualities of a Wise Man – a sorcerer.”

Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday

Shortly after he’d moved in the rumor spread

That the American author was a wizard.

“Such a start it gave me, opening the door

And him standing there, staring through me

Like he was used to seeing cleaner souls than mine.”

Whenever he reached into his pocket Mr. James

Always found a match or just the change he needed

He kept a set of keys for the look of things

Since doors unlocked themselves when he approached.

It was a principal with him never to use magic

For anything important. Arthritis made his hands

Impotent to write more than a paragraph at a time;

He hired a stenographer. His elderly cat, though,

Bounded about lithely; when it died at last

It weighed almost nothing; its soul gone

The corpse gently bobbed against the ceiling.

One evening in 1916 the ghost of his sister Alice

Dropped by to say she had startled a banshee

In the woods at the edge of town. William, she said,

Could not break his promise to haunt a Harvard classroom;

He sent his love. Garth and Wilkie – a little scorched, perhaps

But sober now, were making haste towards him

And should be with him when he died.