Betcha Can't Drink Just One

The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some five thousand volumes of odd ideographs.  The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration,-all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup, I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals.  The seventh cup-ah, but I could take no more!  I only feel the breath of cool wind that rises in my sleeves. Where is Horai Mountain?  Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.


-Lotung, poet from the Tang Dynasty

Shores

From this isle, I can see both
the one left behind fresh with footprints
to be retreaded
in the nights of our lives

and awaiting on the unknown side
are green conifers and dusted gold.

December Sky

matcha, Tuesday morning

I want to see the same branches
in skeins splayed across light
leached in patches of celadon
in the afternoons of my Tuesdays
to see them again and again
never in the same way
accretions of ourselves/original.