After “The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove”

“Let no one hope to find contemplation an escape
from conflict, from anguish or from doubt.”
-- Thomas Merton


There’s a root like the root of a mountain
that runs out radially from the bamboo’s heart:
my old man— no Taoist— had little use
for bamboo but couldn’t rip it out of family
ground, even with his John Deere tractor.

The jade skin, stretching between nodes,
reminded me to be virtuous,
the hollow core between septa encouraged
me to be humble, yet its fruit could bring
rats and plague to ancient China, and maybe
to our North Carolina farm.

It’s as if I’d forgotten how the seven graybeards
toasted the Tao of “presence in absence”,
the yin within the yang, and if I’d never left,
the old farmhouse might’ve become a shrine
protected by its own sacred bamboo.

After a hundred years, an entire stand can flower
and die, starving all the pandas on the mountain.
And the same sprouts, popping through
the ground on a quiet spring night, delighting
the gathered devotees, on another night
can pierce a prisoner’s body, stretched
and staked out above them.

The clump brought by an artist-friend
in a metal bucket took hold in red clay
and inspired the artist in me with its elegant
rhythm in the wind, its shimmering color
in the southern sun. The threat of foreign
growth was too much for my warlord father,
raised to poison what he couldn’t control.

Like the emperor’s court, hiding corruption
and intrigue, the sanctuary of the bamboo grove
can hold a nest of giant hornets in its roots,
ready to sting the heads and rumps
of farmers and wisemen alike.

Is that what caused Ji Kang to hope alchemy
might transmute base metal into gold,
the two Juans to lap up wine from a wooden bowl
with the neighbor’s pig, Liu to walk around
naked in his home, which he considered to be
the whole universe?

The chi of twisted bamboo held
the great Min River Bridge for a thousand years.
The breath of Liu’s bamboo wife,
that beautiful basket cylinder he embraced
on sticky summer nights, cooled his sleep
all of his long life.

If the three nameless ones left the grove,
the changes of nature showed them
the path onward.

Something I read in the I Ching helped me
divine my own rootlessness: “A flight of
dragons without heads. Good fortune.”

And the silk fan and screen artists painted
the truth like lover’s tricks, but these lines,
written on green bamboo strips and sewn
together with sinew as a book,
may lead some reader to see behind
dragon leaves.