Porcelain Breeze

 

Rising before me,

Towering

Six feet tall,

A magnificent Chinese vase.

Like a window 

My imagination opens 

And expands

Within its stillness

I enter deeper

Into its perpetual harmony,

Into new paradigms,

And breeze across its surface

Into an artist's vision 

Come alive from the Yuan dynasty.  

 

Deeper and deeper inside

I expand 

In the fire of its creation, 
In the deep breath of air within it, 
In the cool water of its shape 
And the earthen clay of its substance.

 

Breeze into its empty interior

Where all possibility lies,

Breeze to the whirring center

Of a potter's wheel whose hands

Shaped the potential of clay

Into a solid reality 

Of priceless beauty.

 

 

Like a tree 

I stare into a tall mulberry upon it,

Bending gently in the wind

Upon a cobalt hillside and

Blossoming profusely in a white sky,

Its petals snowing to the ground.

 

I marvel as its blue-white flowers

Rotate perpetually in a porcelain breeze

Astride a glaze of wind

That flows in  a ceaseless fountain 

Of quiet victory.

 

I follow its fluid curvature

To the completion of its arc

And take an excursion at its edge

Upon an azure bridge that leads

To what exists one step beyond

On the next inflection of this vase-

 

A distant shore,

Another state of existence-

Confirmed by art,

That the artist painted there 

From his imagination

Which I cannot see,

But imagine.

                                      *** 

Seasons wander among cerulean blossoms falling

In the blanching heat of a summer day

As the white surface of the vase transforms

Into a quiet, winter scene inside these mountains

Of sunless cobalt ridges embraced

By melting, azure bridges in an emergent spring

With nothing before them,

Nothing behind them, 

And nothing in between, 

Spanning a chasm that opens onto a path 

Everywhere released

Inside these autumn mountains,

A bridge spanning a river of vision

Of what is made real

By the imagination. 

 

Footfalls within the imagination 

Reverberate into new patterns

And reassemble the delicate surface 

Of perception,

Internalizing the external scene

Painted on a vase.

  
                           ***
Inside the painting

I arise before the dawn,
A pilgrim emerging from a hermitage
To climb an arduous, ascending path
And venture higher into these ridges alone,
There to laugh and sing- unseen and unheard,

My heart, my imagination expanded,

Escaped from the exile of these Chinese streets

And regenerated.

Resting in the hollow of a stray, wild mulberry

Where setting suns and emperors rest,
I feel my soul weaving like a silkworm

A home from her marrow
For none but herself,
Transformed by the threads of her own body,
Winding round and round in a weird undergoing

Of forming wings within
The excellence of the heart 

That will always strive to break free

And fly upward to beauty through Art

And find its Way. 

 

 

 

Notes

I saw this vase in a bank display window in one of the cities I visited when I lived in China between '05-07, probably Jiangyin but possibly Qingdao, where I was living at the time when I began this poem. 

In Chinese folk lore, the setting sun and emperors were said to rest in the hollows of a mulberry tree trunk.