Andy Anderson: Essay 7: Three Perfections

Three Perfections

The Chinese understood
that calligraphy, poetry, and painting
are one.  On silk scrolls beautiful words
speak visible sounds, echoes
of the land, of the poet’s place
holding a brush dipped in ink
writing along his horizons
inscriptions intimate like brush strokes
that press from the soul of one
onto that of the other
like lovers by a quiet pond
aware of all the world around
wanting to speak more than
they can say.  They almost blush.
Probably the young man skips stones
trying to find the touch
of their hearts on the world,
something to say.  At last
together, they whisper thoughts
one and then another, over and over.

 Until years later these lovers
find themselves in foreign worlds.
They admire silk scrolls, study
a poet’s calligraphy,
question the fixed seals,
notice in imagination
waves of meaning circling out
from the words tossed across water,
from the waves stirred by a stone’s
first deliberate slap across
the surface of the pond’s mirror.
The stone thrown sideways
skimming across the surface
not to create a splash,
but to find the possible rhythm
and the subsequent pools
connecting syllables into thoughts
until the pebble must sink
beneath the reflected sky
to lie with sand and pondweed
in the dark world
of fishes eyes and clams.

Perhaps they are lovers still
remembering lessons studied
to prepare for future greatness.
He, a young scholar who passes
only the first levels of the Imperial Exam
and finds himself dimly admired
alone in love; she waits
for the future official to illuminate
white spaces in her life.
She stands with him in her own love
and knows that promises do not
exist forever.  Always fleeting,
hope rests only in art, in light
fixed by whoever briefly owns
the moments of a silk scroll,
and places beautiful words
on the images of dreams
before returning to the ancestors,
before being submerged in the
changing course of rivers.