POEMS
David Weiss
TRAVELER'S ADVISORY
In the sun-backed cirrus
unfurling across the lake like rice paper,
your steady hand at work,
Kai-Yu Hsu:
a robed traveler and the mountain
that towers above him,
which he will climb a lone toward evening
as shadows recast and thatch his face.
I cannot make it out more clearly than that–
the traveler listens at the brook and prepares
even as his landscape goes ashen in the sky.
About his bare ca lves dimness like a vine winds indelibly.
A word, Kai- Yu Hsu, before you start up the slender trail:
what has happened makes you unimaginable,
no longer the man who plucks a white feather
from the wing of his largest goose
and shaves its tip carefu ll y not to a point:
he has something difficult
to
shape
which averts its face in ways that,
to be true, must return its fierce
gaze to his patient fingertips.
Poised thus, he hears the traveler's
shadow glide past toward the bamboo
bridge and wants a word with him
which might unleash the simple means
to see through mist and moss and leaf
to the mountain's jagged contours.
I, too, see nothing more when I look out
