“Portrait of the Artist with Li Po” by Charles Wright

The “high heavenly priest of the White Lake” is now
a small mound in an endless plain of grass,
his pendants clicking and pearls shading his eyes.
He never said anything about the life after death
whose body is clothed in the bluegrass and the smoke of dew.

He liked flowers and water most.
Everyone knows the true story of how he would write his verses & float them,
by paper boats, downstream
just to watch them drift away.
Death never entered his poems, but rowed, with its hair down, far out on the lake,
laughing and looking up at the sky.

Over a 1000 years later, I write out one of his lines in a notebook,
the peach blossom follows the moving water,
and watch the October darkness gather against the hills.
All night long the river of heaven will move westward while no one notices.
The distance between the dead and the living
is more than a heartbeat and a breath.

Charles Wright
in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry

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