The Lin Chu Poems

For the past fifteen years I've been working on three sequences of poems called The Lin Chu Poems. Two previous groups were published in Heaven of Small Moments (Broken Jaw Press, 1998) and Singing the Flowers Open (Gaspereau Press, 2001).

The five poems here are from These Poems Aren't Just Sparks Thrown Out on the Road, a book of versions, translations and poems which will be a follow-up to The Deer is Thirsty for the Mountain Stream. The book will include 20 Lin Chu poems, 10 by Feng Chih, 10 by Frederico Garcia Lorca, and 6 each by Rumi and Mirabai. Each section will have a separate introduction.

We need more love poems now, and I think the Lin Chu poems help fill that gap. After a period when there were huge chasms between men and women, it seems that we're looking for connections, conjunctions and mutual ground again.

1

Sometimes I feel you know where I am,
and what I secretly want, and where this love is leading.

I live through days endless as falling snow.
I repeat your name over and over; long to hold your face.

Dark water laps at my feet. My desire helps
fill the wound of a love without resolution.

How long before this love takes even my mind away?
If you truly heard me, you’d be here now.

I can no longer bear the thought of living without you.
If I call up your presence, then surely you will come.


2

We're all drunk in this tavern. Things are happening
at the next table that we know nothing of.

Why should I ask for mercy? Half of what I have
is owned by someone else.

Dear God, I cry out to you in the middle of the night:
"Do you hear me or not?" "Whom did I love before I was born?"

These questions don't get any better
when they're greeted with silence.

There's a Way. I know it; I follow it.
These poems aren't just quartz thrown out on the road.


3

When we leave the last word to love, the dance begins,
the old desires and preoccupations.

Someone said you were talking about me.
My face burns, and I wake up suddenly from a dream.

I've heard that the molecules of our bodies
break up at night and join with the one we love.

I want to come back as a single petal wrung
from your heart, painting the earth red with love.

This abundance, this scent rising from the fields--
Krishna longing for Radha, you walking down the road again


4

When we first met, shooting stars fell across the sky.
What would have happened if you'd decided to stay?

What sort of courage does it take to be who we are?
What kind of music brings out joy instead of grieving?

The water hyacinths seem a little dishevelled.
We're like that sometimes, caught up in the intensities of love.

The pleasures of the day are counted in heartbeats.
Sometimes one glimpse or touch is enough.

The wine we've always wanted is created between us.
We drink all day, and still there is more than we need.


5

I’m given over to the night sometimes. The dark swell
of ocean waves is all I can hear.

The tern returns to her nest, and it is lovely, braided
from the common threads of longing and grief.

I walk a long road where the only voice is the breathing
of the dark.

I wake up in the night; Don’t ever leave me!:
the owls understand that cry.

When we met, my heart turned into a black swan.
Listen to it swimming toward you.

(Lin Chu Poems Copyright Allan Cooper, 2006)