Li Po, one of the “Seven Sages of Wine”

He was a gleaming brocade of gold...

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like a sonorous jade cup his childhood was of porcelain his crazy youth a murmuring bamboo forest full of herons and mysteries

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faces of women in the lagoon nightingales enchanted by the moon in the cages of psalteries

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alternating fireflies that tangled the path

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of the poet drunk on wine with the zigzag of their lanterns

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Until the poet falls like a heavy porcelain jar and the wind strips his thoughts like a flower

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a toad that sonorous unwinds a Confucian paragon and a cricket that laughs mockingly

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a bird that chirps musical and brief like an ocarina

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in an almond tree blossoming with snow

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better to travel in a palanquin and make an endless poem

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in the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing

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guided by his pale hand

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the brush is a silkworm that formed on the paper a black chrysalis of a mysterious hieroglyph from which a magnificent thought would emerge like a flower with flying golden wings

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Subtle and mysterious flame in the lamp of the ideogram

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The Cormorants of the idea on the banks of meditation of the Blue and Yellow rivers want with fluttering desire to fish for the moon’s gleam... but their beaks catch nothing which break the star’s reflection into mercurial shards of mother-of-pearl and alabaster

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and Li Po watches motionless as in the brown lacquer silence restores the pearl of the MOON

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The moon is a silver spider that casts its web

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on the river that portrays it

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And Li Po the divine one who drank

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the moon one night in his cup of wine

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He feels the enigmatic spell and falls asleep in the vice of the lunatic wine

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“Where is Li Po? Call for him,” the Emperor commands from his Yamen

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Somewhat drunk at last among a feminine throng, the Poet arrives and bows; a concubine hands him the brush loaded with Chinese ink,

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another, fine silk for paper, and Li writes thus:

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I am alone with my flask of wine under a flowering tree

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the moon appears and its ray says that we are now two and my own shadow announces later that we are now THREE

 

although the star cannot drink its share of the wine

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and my shadow does not want to go away for it is with me

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in this pleasant company I will laugh at my sorrows as long as spring lasts

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Look at the moon which to my songs throws its answer in serene splendor and look at my shadow which lightly dances all around me

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If I am in my sober judgment of shadow and the moon’s friendship is mine when I get drunk our company dissolves

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but soon we will join to never separate again in the immense joy of the Blue firmament beyond

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believing that the moon’s reflection was a cup of white jade and golden wine to take it and drink it one night while rowing down the river Li Po drowned

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And for eleven hundred years incense rises raising a perfumed cloud to the sky... and for eleven hundred years China echoes a double funeral mourning that sorrow in the immortal crystal gong of the full moon!