Our friend no longer walks among the living,
But is translated, not into words in a strange alphabet,
Rather into that bluish phosphorescence behind the dolphin
As it furrows the sea south of Rhodes.

Once I saw him in the vermillion of the poet’s brush
As he slid onto the paper.
He swirled for a while in the inkstone,
Mixing with the water carried from the spring
And with the wolf’s hair tapering from its bamboo shaft,
Now with his color
Guiding the poet’s words.

By midday the rocks of the canyon wall are soaked in sunlight,
And it is then our friend sings with the rarest voice,
Sometimes a moan like a pine split by wedges of ice
In a forest in Kamchatka,
Sometimes eerie like the subaquaeous calls of whales
As they skirt a southern continent.
His colors sing as the rocks can no longer bear his beauty
And release him into the twilight.

Once I felt his heat long before I saw him,
In the night, cooling,
His red in veins mottled with grey,
As the lava of a new island glowed and displaced the sea.

Since then I have seen him as the silver coating a seal climbing onto black cobbles,
Or as the violet and green in the eyes of women purring with desire,
Or in the fire playing about the logs in the grate,
And casting a shadow play for the old men sipping brandy.

But today he is yesterday’s light
Trapped in the snow falling from a leaden sky,
The whiteness inside the mounds and drifts
Where once was a wall or road,
A stream or a field of yellowing wheat stubble.

January 26th, 2007