Still More Poems that Strike me

July Mountain

We live in a constellation

Of patches and of pitches,

Not in a single world,

In things said well in music,

On the piano, and in speech,

As in a page of poetry –

Thinkers without final thoughts

In an always incipient cosmos,

The way, when we climb a mountain,

Vermont throws itself together.

Wallace Stevens, "Late Poems (1950-55)," Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America 1997).

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

The birds have vanished down the sky.

Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

Li Po/ Li Bai (Hamill, translator) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  Going out in stormy weather

Cold Mountain

I am sometimes asked the way to the Cold Mountain;

There is no path that goes all the way.

Even in summer the ice never melts;

Far into the morning the mists gather thick.

How, you may ask, did I manage to get here?

My heart is not like your heart.

If only your heart were like mine

You too would be living where I live now.

Han-shan

Translated by Arthur Waley

Dream in the Summer of my Seventy-third Year 

I am behind a funeral cortege on a mountain road 

And decide to pass it, but it seems to go on forever 

And I'm completely exposed in the oncoming lane 

And the only way out is to merge into the caravan 

Of mourners. It is getting dark and a thick snow 

Begins to fall in a sudden flurry and then stops 

Abruptly, which gives the world an expectant air, 

Though, really, nothing in particular happens 

After a snowfall, except for the intense stillness 

In the pine forest the road is winding through.

Robert Haas

[Traveler, your footprints]

Traveler, your footprints 

are the only road, nothing else.

Traveler, there is no road;

you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path 

you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;

only a ship's wake on the sea.

-Antonio Machado