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is supposed to be honoring grandmothers, and admiring

macho men? “Do not let mother and father go

hungry; feed them meat from the flesh of your arm.”

Walking past the incense ladies, all

acting important, I go inside the temple.

Up on platforms, the fortune-tellers,

all men, perform their specialties—

coins, yarrow, the I Ching, magic

birds, turtle shells. They read palms,

read the loops and whorls and arches on

fingerprints, read words on sticks of

bamboo, read faces and freckles

and bumps on heads. I buy a fortune.

I point to a little cage in a row

of little cages. The magic man slides

open the door. Out hops a java

finch. It picks up a card in its diamond

beak: the Woman Warrior, charging forth

on her white horse, wielding her double broadswords.

“You are brave, you will live a long life.”

But he must tell everyone: You’ll live long.

Never death. Never suicide. The java finch

eats a reward of seeds, and hops back

into its cage. In Xi’an, there are drum

towers and bell towers, and wild goose

towers. Chinese contrary, the Small

Wild Goose is 13 stories

high; the Big Wild Goose, 7.

A poet was once seen riding a wild goose,

flying over the city, and away. All

had been golden, the goose, the poet, his robes,

the towers. The eyewitnesses watched until

they saw what seemed to be a golden insect

vanish into the sky. I give incense

and make slow bows at Big Wild Goose,

that I should write well, like Du Fu

and Li Bai, who had both come here,

and written well. That my writing give life,

to whomever I write about, as Shakespeare

promised. Chinese are mad for long life.

Quest and wish for time, more time,

more, yet more. Carve poems and decrees

on rocks. Erect forests of steles. 500

pyramids to safeguard the emperors

inside them, and their armies, and horses,

acrobats, and musicians, always. I myself

have tasted longlife medicine—bitter.

My mother gave it to us. Rabbit-in-the-Moon—

my father—mixes the elixir for immortality.

But I have seen poets training in impermanence.

Early in the paved city, when dew beads

the marble and concrete, the poets write with water.

He or she stands quietly holding

the tall brush, like a lance, like a shuffleboard

paddle, like a pole vault pole. Then touches

the writing end—a cloth-wrapped mallet, not a mop—

down upon the hard ground, the page.

Legs spread, the poet, straddling the coming words,

sweeps downward stroke to the left, upward

stroke to the right, dabs quick dots,

pulls horizontal lines, pulls vertical

lines, flips a sharp-curve tail.

Gets to the end before the beginning dries.

Onlookers, readers, and fellow poets

leaning on their own writing poles, read

aloud the transpiring words, one

word, next word, then the whole

fleeting poem, exclaim over it, criticize it,

memorize it, sing it once more as the sun

dries it up. They stand around the spot

where the poem had been, don’t step on it,

and discuss the writing of it, the idea of it,

the prosody of it with its creator. The sun rises,

time to wet the brushes in the water bucket.

Dip again and again, and write long

long lines. No corrections! No

reworking! One poet writes,

another poet writes—in answer!

I should’ve asked to borrow a writing pole,

and drawn an enso as big a circle as I

could make in one wet swoop all

the way around myself, me the center.

In Japanese Zen, on your 60th birthday,

you can draw a perfect circle. However

it arcs or squiggles, however black or faint,

large or small, one swoop or 2

discontinuous strokes—perfect.

You’ve brought to the making of it your lifetime

of ability. My perfect reader would know to read

my enso’s journey from Asia to America back

to Asia, from classical times to modern, to New Age.

In the park of formal gardens, the martial artists—

practitioners of the many ways of kung fu,

and disco, women with fans, women with the long

ribbon, swordswomen, swordsmen—are moving

and dancing to the rhythms of his own discipline,

her own discipline. Solitaries, too, claim

their places