Lessons In China

In each pagoda

The last scent

Of sandlewood

Gathers in mourners

Of antiquity, the disturbed

Ying, the disturbed Yang

Like disquieted agricultures

Involving days and days and days.

The Geishas have gone

And the calligraphic

Stroke of a new history

Swells, turns and enshrines,

Bamboo music in rice fields

Sheltering each circumference

Of disillusionment.

And there are no idolatories now,

Just an isolation, Buddha

Once golden, once pure, once

Intemperate by spirits now fallen

In bonsai gardens, his sandlewood

Scent riven, a digression,

A diminishment,

Falling as the young boy

In Tiananmen Square

Edged in toward the Red Book

With a look of terracotta culture

Whilst in Tibet each saffron monk

Shifted to a stillness louder

Than any understandable groan

Of dragons posturing in disbelief,

A silenced gong, a fable rich

In any pleasure, in each pagoda

The last scent, the last murmur

Of something having happened

And having happened nothing

Being the same again.