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雲橫秦嶺家何在
—Han Yu (韓愈)
Mountain, o mountain, your white hat and
deep blue wrinkles bounding the mortal
skyline, bounding the world that my eyes
can see. Clouds, o clouds, soft and nimble
as a green armorless brigade of routine solitude
marching in to liberate the sizzling city,
tear down alien vermilion suns and bring me
solace. A lonely, lonely solace as here I
sit, lofty heavens rumbling beneath me,
and when I sit here, looking at you, I remember
you are the direction of home.
Mountain, o mountain! My home, it is far
west, eastern but far west, east and west
conjoined at a made-up line. When you
are here, sunlight over snow caps, sunlight
over cloud mantles, my home is asleep, its
silty river curled up like a gourd-patterned cat.
I have friends there, just as there are
mountains there, uplifted by gods fighting,
punctured by self-appointed gods of chemistry.
We used to be together, just as
the mountains are still together, huddled cozily
in green—lovely little things. But today
I am far away, and seeing you jut out
all brazenly, I think of my homebound friends.
Mountain, o mountain, how do I get to see
my friends? I mean, I see them every day,
electronic reductions of themselves before I
switch them off, shove them into my pocket,
returning to other things, other people,
other loves. But a love of sharp mountains
is unlike a love of the rounded, eroded ones,
for it burns brighter, but it rarely cuts deep.
The age of the earth, the soul of it all,
draws from the lovely little things called hills,
eroded mountains of time past, stirred
out of unquiet sadness, a greenish gentle
memory. A memory of past friends.
You see, mountain, I miss my friends
more than a telescope misses stars on a clouded eve,
more than trees miss the warmth of sun in the winter,
but just as much as a bird, grand-daughter of
grass-eating ankylosaurs, longs southernly
when seasonal unreadiness shrivels her wings.
She rarely misses home, but when she does,
it warms her, it churns her, beckoning to her
with the promise of love. So she tries
to fly again, soaring over you mountain,
but the south, the south of her home,
is an abstract place, for she misses home,
but it is the missing that makes it home.