AUGUST, YELLOW BUTTERFLIES, BUT NO LI PO

I remember that during my late teens on the farm in Kentucky I'd sit beside the tobacco field reading and thinking this: "When I'm old, I want to write poems just like Li Po's." Li Po, also known as Li Bai, lived in China from AD 701 to 762. Here's an example of something he wrote, translated by Ezra Pound:

The leaves fall early this autumn,
in wind. The paired butterflies are
already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.

This week when I stumbled upon that poem again, I said to myself, "It's August, we have plenty of yellow butterflies, and now I'm an old man," so I set about trying to write my Li-Po-like poem. It got off to a good start. The first thing that happened on the morning of the day I'd chosen to start poetizing was that I popped off the lid of my big mug so I could pump water into it, and inside, seemingly impossibly, there was a black, shiny little cricket, all legs and face and fluttery wings.

So, there was my topic. For, a terrified little cricket in a receptacle that usually bestows comfort and pleasure surely is imagery just as good if not better than Li Po's falling leaves and yellow butterflies.

But, no poem came.

Also this week there've been: sleeping, dreaming dogs yipping, smiling and waving their feet; a limestone rock on whose flat face natural fractures spelled "HI"; a fledgling Yucatan Jay who jumped with fright when a caterpillar on the leaf beside him suddenly uncoiled its body; a young turtle very interested in biting me but with a mouth too small to get my finger into it; a male persimmon tree that dropped its flowers onto me as I read beneath it each afternoon;a little cumulus cloud one day at noon that showered me for a few seconds, though it was so small and white in the blue sky it looked like it couldn't even cast a decent shadow... All good stuff for a Li-Po-type poem.

But, no poem.

Maybe it's because my life isn't as tragic as Li Po's, for it seems that the best poetry comes when times are bad. When Li Po wrote, war was tearing apart his world, and he seems to have really regretted turning old. That "west garden" he mentions, in the poetry-code of his time, refers to the west where the Sun sets -- as soon he would -- and his garden was a place of pleasure that in August was drying up, destined for a wintry death. Despair within despair. In fact, much of Li Po's writing was done during bouts of wine drinking.

In contrast, despite my present world being in such a mess, with just as much misery and pointless destruction as during his time, I personally feel pretty good, maybe too good to get into a proper Li Po mood. I don't even drink, or brood about my desperation and life's pointlessness. I just can't feel desperate, because I understand that the "point" of things is simply to be, to feel, to think, and to evolve, and I'm doing that.

Still, this poetry business is a funny thing. I suppose that even in my being unable to summon a Li Po poem, there's a poem. But, I can't summon that one, either.