PAINTING WHITE MOUNTAIN

Wang Wei's beloved snow
sits prepared. A saucer of crushed oyster shell.

He looks out the window,
pulls a screen across summer.

All morning he renders the peaks,
calcified by the skull-bone stroke.

Wrinkle-in-the-devil's-face
he keeps to deepen ravines.

Each fissure, each cleft adds dignity to rock,
small resting places on the long way up.

Crystals blow in from the west. Remote,
the plains open where one could stretch out forever.

He goes to his cot in afternoon.
By four o'clock, the footpath appears

he'd pondered for days. Tracking the followers,
he paints their mountain retreat,

dim as a cave with a bell at its heart.
Few leaves hang coldly to the maple.

His wrist moves as a guide to the snow.
The whole of August he musters whiteness

onto boiled and beaten silk
and hears the monks chant.

Frost on a ledge honors that voice.
His own name he sets aside,

the hut abandoned by autumn.

First published in New England Review and Poetry Daily