Mao lit out for the tan Yanan Hills, surviving on conviction and rice gruel. I only came to meet Tu Fu and Li Po, those poets in their T'ang boat, spluttering their poems on West Lake, drifting aimless toward dawn's mottled skin, plum blossoms caught in their beards. Forever an exile, I settled in America, where natives are aliens but hate to admit it. We have jeweled lawns and bread lines. God-fearing men plan wars to end all wars.
Legend says they toppled overboard, tried to cling to each other, drowned in a net of stars.
Legends lie in the face of heaven. White space dominates, as with a poem framed in its white window. The handle's a thick dark swatch, the tines gnarled, claw-like, curled in suggested weeds. The gardener leaned it there, having neatened the soil around flowers, maybe, or a grave. He has worked in heat and rain, year and year, has seen floods, famine, war, all the debris of history, and still devotes himself to chrysanthemums.