Climbing Tai Shan
Six thousand steps,
'every step an arrival.'On the way up, I'm thinking
...what to say when I pass
through the South Gate
to Heaven, as soon I must?History has it
I'm supposed to say
something unforgettable,
wise. Confucius,
for example, looking down,
said: 'The world is small.'At the Temple of Azure Clouds,
an old Chinese woman
with bound feet and walking
stick--a peasant woman,
a supplicant--appears to me.
Is she my mother?Shall I say,
having climbed the mountain,
'I have climbed the mountain,'
am there, and will live
one hundred years?The Han Emperor Wu,
who, twenty-one hundred
years ago, rejected
every manuscript
his writers submitted,
has a monument too:
a wordless, blank stone--
on which I can write anything,
the Emperor being dead.Silence is unforgettable, wise.