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I’d like to ask someone good with her hands
To help me bind two books into one.
I’d like to see two sacred books sharing a space
What would they cook up under one cover?
Would they rattle and shake on the shelf?
Could I manage to read straight through?
I fear they would conceive something freakish
But there are horns around me in the crowd anyway.
Let me join Europa in decking horns with flowers.
Don’t leave this dialogue to firebrands
Who always play it out in fits and starts
In the fire and blood of history.
Mutual influence can happen
Like Laozi and Confucius talking for 2000 years.
I want to bring the dialogue close
Though I have to grit my teeth.
I’m a piece of timber for a bridge
And I’ve been out in the weather
I was a diploma mill product
Congenitally curious,
Any old edge seemed worth trying,
But meetings and partings made it real,
History made me a witness
In the country stretched over borderlands.
My mind also dreams high and low
While I’m being pulled left and right.
I’ve got this trunk of my body
With two arms flung out
And where the lines cross
There’s something leaping,
So I know about hanging on a cross,
And when the end comes, I want to redeem people too;
I’d like to figure out how they do that!
I want a special Christmas tree
With hexagrams for ornaments;
Tips of all the branches will be visible
But where they join the trunk is a mystery.
I wish someone with craft in her hands
Would fashion me a special Christmas wreath.
I want pinecones chewed up by a lawn mower
To be part of the decoration, and a ribbon
That flew from a car antennae in the rain.
Manjusri once told Shancai Bodhisattva:
Go pick something medicinal for me.
Shancai looked around and saw
There was no herb that was not medicinal
So he just plucked any old sprig.
Manjusri turned it in his fingers and said:
“This sprig of medicine can cure a man
But it can also kill a man!”
© 2003, Denis Mair
Originally from Ohio, where he attended Kent State in 1970, the year the National Guard killed four students, Denis Mair has made a life as a translator and scholar of Chinese, working for Tiandi Jiao, a Daoist-Confucian group, and translating contemporary Chinese poets. His first book of poems, Man Cut in Wood (Valley Contemporary Poets), was published in 2003. His work is online among the Poetry Superhighway Poet of the Week archives.
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