it's not a diary.
it is a wind of blue satin
between poverty and poetry
where people begin to love
only the fences they have built

the cuckoo in the woods
is calling like a haiku,
the meadow is a pointillist painting
the shadow of the past
is on the sundial

and humanity--oh the humanity! is softly
singing in a broken mason jar
a song of parting that never ends
a song that can walk through walls

*drawing by Allie Brosh

above the distant mountain
the golden cradle of the moon
gently rocked in the swaying branches
of the old maple, to the music

of the wind bells on my balcony.

i came inside, then, and i thought of you
as a long shadow slipped along the doorstep
and firelight from the kitchen stove
cast a red glow

on my bare arms

After three years away from you,
I'm back at last for one day, and more.
We drink green Luling wine this evening
and I see yellow cloth-wrapped books, like when I left.
My sick bones still exist,
so nothing is impossible in this world!
Why bother to plead with the dice,
just throw them and let them roll!

~ Li He (797-817)
Distantly related to the imperial clan and extremely talented,
Li He was nevertheless an unsuccessful scholar who attained
only the lowest posts in his brief life (he died at the age of
twenty-six). His poetry, like that of Meng Jiao, can be bitterly
sarcastic and reflects the frustration he must have felt in his career.
He had a penchant for erotic, romantic, and even morbidly violent
imagery, and his poems grated on the nerves with the shrieking of ghosts,
weeping of flowers, and the burning of sinister fires. He was something
of a Chinese Edgar Allen Poe, though a much better poet than Poe was,
and like Poe, his reputation suffered because literary culture
couldn't stomach his unclassifiable works of genius. Sponsored in his day
by the prominent poet and prose writer Han Yu, Li He quickly
disappeared from literary consciousness after his death, making a comeback
only in the last two centuries. Two hundred forty of his poems have survived
centuries of neglect, though legend states that what remains was part of a larger
collection that was thrown into a toilet by a vindictive cousin.