Poem after THE ORIGIN OF THE RIVER by Wang Kai

The soil turns year after year, chthonic
Spirits slipping the loose bonds of earth--
Piled up, they are tools grinding
To get back to the deepening fields
Where the earth and water combine into the brown
Loam.  Singing out this passion, river

Spirits speak soft notes that rhyme with the river

on several levels:   the green earthly

level, the sound of the ground and the fields,

the air where dirt meets the sky and grinds

against heaven.  Oh yes, there are chthonic

unions in the soil.  The earth is brown

and as perfect as love.  The water is brown

and as perfect as love.  What’s remarkable, what’s grinding,

is the movement of bodies, celestial, chthonic,

water-bound in filaments of fiber, in the earthy

imagination of the artist.    The river

speaks to the land, the fields,

row after row of hard or fallow fields,
approaching the horizon, the earthy

end of this world.  We are here watching the grinding

formation of spirits in their attempt to contact the brown

space between planets,  heavenly opposite to the chthonic

patch we call Earth.  Even at the river’s

forking into three distinct rivers

the truth of the land and it people is an earthy

truth that comes to bear much later in the brown

spirit world that surrounds us all.  Grinding

its way to the heart of the matter,  the fields

are alive with dancing and ritual to the chthonic

sequence of the seasons, the dusky chthonic

customs flow forward like the river, a brown

lesson among the sweet orchards, a grinding

of fruit into cider.  In the meantime, we await the earthy

rendition of fate to the promise of fields

the sweet song of rivers.

And it is here I’ve seen the brown, grinding

fibers and earthy colors reminding me of fields

of rivers, of the chthonic impulse.