Li Po
Li Po
There is the watery, uneasy feeling, that one has been there before, has encountered that reservoir of emotion, some other year, under one’s fingertips if one could only remember when and where; and how often of late I find myself seeking it in the utterly useless as if I were, as I sometimes feel myself to be, the ancient Chinese poet gazing at the moon’s reflection and longing for comrades of old from the other side of the mountains. Having been or having thought myself to be committed to the useful, I now find myself wandering into patches of sunlight for no reason but to be there, looking down for long stretches at the arrangements of moss on stone, floating on my back in a pond looking up at clouds. Uselessness is the purview of the very young and very old whose gift is the finding out of these reservoirs—even time falls off the edges, unrelated to anything and especially not to you.