Never mind the crushed knuckle,
the one that held the nail for the hammer.
Everything you do is bent, gnarled,
upside down, devilish, illegal,
like speeding, wrong and exhilarating.

You think for yourself,
backwards, from effect to cause.
You scratch up on itches, down on dogs,
stroke my beard like an absent friend,
gesticulate with forkfulls
of food, broccoli flying.
Your fingers, lazy and forgetful,
send me unzipped into the street!

How did you get so strange?
Like an elemental particle is "strange"
- a quark or boson flying everywhere
and nowhere at once, through walls
said to be solid but transparent
to your excitable turns.
You feel the unseen world as it really is-
bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean,
filled with delight!

When you were young, you acted restrained,
nose picker, ass wiper, marble flicker,
retired deep into your sleeve at night, speechless.
Now you reveal your jaguar spots,
far more alert than the rest of me.
You spring swiftly over the keys
ravenous for scattering prey.

You come away gripping a hairy tail in your fist,
offering up to my ears the sound you were seeking,
or a handful of feathers of the bird whose soul
you needed to possess, the bloody carcass
of a freakish longing that only you relieve,
enough red meat to spell me for a day,
though I be tarred and feathered and run out
of town by a mob of flaming right hands.

The poet known today as Horace invented the poem about poetry, Ars Poetica, "the art of poetry," during the Pax Romana in the first century BCE. Horace's chatty hexameters instruct readers in the why, how and wherefore of making poems and plays. In China, the foundation for lyric poetry was laid in the 3rd century CE by retired general, statesman and poet Lu Chi in his brilliant prose poem, Wen Fu, "The Art of Writing." Emerson, America's greatest prophet of poetry, accepted the challenge his hallucinatory essay, The Poet," and also in wild lines like these: Poets are colorpots; Dovesnecks & opaline; Exquisite daintiness; Vapors of wine; Delicate gloom; Barrel of opium; Blowing simoom.

The modern and contemporary poets from around the world gathered into this anthology have accepted the weight of that long tradition of writing in the art they love about the practice, purpose and power of the art they love. The result is an abundance of eloquence that will not fail readers in their quest to understand the mysterious flow of poems to capture what Denies Levertov termed. "the uncommon speech of Paradise." or as Gwendolen Brooks said, "we hail what heals, sponsors, restores."

I regret last night I did not tell you
how much I love you.

How much your radiant
beauty means to me.

How your palette of warm colors
lights up my night.

I stare open-mouthed
at your marvels,
unique, so far as I can see,
in the universe.

I regret I only send back to you
an enigma, a made-up story,
a bit of rock and dust.

Though it is a love story,
for we both love stories.

Mine is of the sad man in the moon,
always loving, but always distant.

What I feel from the embrace of you
is so much more than I return-
your tides, your months of light
and dark, your moods.

Last night I rose splendid
on your horizon, full as I can be,
bleeding for you.  And later
tried to light a path directly
to each of your eyes alone.
So you too could be illuminated.
Did you see me?

A fruitless task in early summer, Great
Horned babies screeching all night from cedar
branches for parents to feed them. Scree! Scree!

During the day, even, heedless young ones land
on the ground, unfurl their scary new wings
like huge eyes, even the dogs wary.

Not yet the frightening guttural questions
of adults- "Who?  Who?  Who are you?"
"Who full of why in the night?"
"Who trying to sleep, but cannot" and so listen
to the babies' plaintive note, "Scree, Scree,"
meaning "feed me, feed me," for which
ragged parents' work their magic wings,
feathers defeating all sound with softness
until the rabbit feels the needle claws
pierce its already broken neck, and the vole,
so adept at avoidance, suddenly becomes a pellet
of pressed fur and threaded bones, its life borrowed

by the silence of the night in which terrible
surprise lives and hunts and calls out
"Feed me, feed me," and answers with claws.

Poets too feed by listening and calling out,
mimicking the rusty screeches, mumbles,
moans and tremolo of older poets gone before.
Listening in the night, and calling out hunger
for syllables and the silences between,
"Feed me, feed me!" as talons of blood
and ink pierce the defenseless page.

When I am eighty
I am going to throw a big party
for myself

When I am eighty
I am going to dress up
in white pants
and a white shirt
with black suspenders
and let a white horse
nibble out of my hand

When I am eighty
I am going to get up
at three in the morning
and walk and think
in the quiet

When I am eighty
I am going to tell story after story
and laugh and laugh
and think all my ideas
are good ones

When I am eighty
I'm going to be mad as hell
if you don't do it my way

When I am eighty
I am going to send grandchildren
on treks along back country streams
and go home and read the paper.
Because I will know
there are younger parents
to find them.
But without me
no one would have any
good stories to tell.

When I am eighty
I will hold the fine silk goblet
of my wife in both my hands.
That will be all the life
I can handle.

Five pilgrims from America ascended
peaks and descended elevators
exploring poetry, Buddhism and history
in the autumn of 2006.
Stories of their wine drinking linger
throughout the country, and in their minds.
At Han-shan's cave they were briefly still.
Ask the current hermit of you don't believe.

I carry the grief of the world
in a joyful body.  What should I do?

I step out the door at dawn, pleased
to find the sun once again cool and friendly.

At evening, I retire to my hut
desperate and murderous,
 the earth retiring in flames.

At midnight, the moon mocks
monks who see in her brave shine
cool enlightenment, not hot despair.

Soon enough, dawn will arrive
as the Devil himself
striding over the rim of the earth
horned head hot with laughter.

What witless pact we mortals signed
to gain the slave toiling inside our dishwashers,
lighting our way at night, amusing us to sleep.

I already feel the heat, the shame,
and it is not yet noon.

In history this never happens. But in life, all the time.
My older brother, who died before he was born, has been found!
He is 1,200 years old, more or less,
the poet known by the cave where he lived
- Cold Mountain, Cold Cliff.
No one knows his other names.
No one knows the state where he was born.
Since the day I was born, I missed his voice.

"Don't merely follow in the footsteps of old masters-
Seek what they sought," Basho wrote 300 years ago.
So I enter the cave called the Goodhue County Jail,
eager to see your cells and compare them to my own.
Ahh, you are lucky!  No clutter.  Easier, then,
to ask the unasked question, the unanswerable one.
To find, after wild summer storms, the still pond
where a frog, attentive to your approach, leaps in, kerplunk!