so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
w.c.w.
Will O’ 
That’s very spare and pretty. Who’s wcw?
W.C. Wields?
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
– e. e. cummings
..and another love poem…I thinks it must be hard to write a good love poem, free of cliche and strained sentiment.
Exile
by Hart Crane
My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, –
No, – nor my lips freed laughter since ‘farewell’,
And with the day, distance again expands
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.
Yet, love endures, though starving and alone.
A dove’s wings clung about my heart each night
With surging gentleness, and the blue stone
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.
I sincerely apologize. I guess I hijacked the thread.
Dale
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
w.c.w.
Mescaline trip or cannabis, no question.
Nah…maybe it’s just because of where I grew up, but this poem both touches me and makes perfect sense.
–James
Yeah, well poetry is the last legal high, it moves me too,
but, you see, we didn’t write it.
I was reading Sartre’s Nausea and there’s the long passage
where he’s sitting in a park looking at a tree, and it becomes
this shape, brown and textured, a thing, not a root, not
a branch, sinuous etc.
Mescaline, I figured. So I got hold of Hazel Barnes,
who translated Being and Nothingness. Mescaline,
she agreed. Sartre had a friend at the Sorbonne
who was doing experiments with mescaline.
People were tripping through fields of wild flowers,
they thought. So he invited Sartre to try it.
Sartre had the first bad trip, he thought he was being
chased by lobsters and other crustacea, and for years
after thought he was being followed by lobsters.
Well, at least he got some publishable literature out
of it.
The question remains: what is Dale using?
I reject all recreational drugs and I do not drink. My own native brain chemicals are at work here.
And what about Mountain Dew?
Nice poem, Will.
Should we be relieved or frightened? 
Now we need a flute poem. This is from Li Po, 8th century.
First, translated by Wai-Lim Yip
HEARING THE FLUTE IN THE CITY OF LOYANG IN A SPRING NIGHT Li Po
Whose jade-flute is this, notes flying invisibly
Scatter into spring winds, fulling City of Loyang?
Hearing the “Break-a-Willow-Twig” tonight,
Who can withhold the surge of thoughts of home?
and translated here by someone else–can’t find the credit:
Spring Night in Lo-yang Hearing a Flute
In what house, the jade flute that sends these dark notes drifting,
scattering on the spring wind that fills Lo-yang?
Tonight if we should hear the willow-breaking song,
who could help but long for the gardens of home?
I’m interested in the translation problems these guys have to deal with. You’ve got the chinese characters and translating more or less literally, here’s what you have:
Line 1:
whose house jade flute dark/invisible/subdued flying/fleeting sound
Line 2:
scatter enter spring wind/s fill Lo City
Line 3:
this night tune middle hear break (name of a tune) willow
Line 4
what man not arouse/move/stir old-(home) garden thought/feeling
That’s it. That’s what they have to work from.
Just looking at the transliteral, you could go:
From whose house, whose jade flute, fly these dark notes
scattering on the spring wind, filling Loyang?
When, on this night, hearing the willow-breaking song,
What man would not be moved of thoughts of his garden, his home?
Do you have a link to a Chinese version?
Is this it?
from http://www.chinapage.org/libai2n.html#062
and http://www.chinapage.org/libai/libai2e.html#00
That’s it. I’d recognize it anywhere.
Here’s a fun thing we can do. In a little while, I’ll post a literal English translation of a poem in Chinese, and we’ll let people have a go at translating it into readable English. So as to not influence each other, I’ll lock the thread and people can email their entries. Then when I have them all, I’ll open the thread and post them. FUN!!
Dale
And now back to english.
yahooo!
(Mountain Valley has such cool ideas.)
I think this is one of the most successful translations
from the Chinese. (Pound, it is widely thought, translated it
from a Chinese laundry ticket while he was coked to the gills on Kava Kava.)
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.
– Ezra Pound
[Biography]
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)