These paintings don't show dragons,
or snarling guardian spirits or Foo Dogs--
just miniatures in dark robes,
a third of the way up a mountain,
climbing past carefully composed pagodas,
teahouses, and foot-bridged ponds.
Even birds are scant. Calligraphy
in the margin comments on the quality
of the art, but tells us nothing
really, like why they seem
always to go up, never down,
and more importantly how part
of the landscape is mere air that
we must fill in. Perhaps
those white spaces are ours
to see the drift into
eternity that the present
always provides, never filling
in the whole space, unlike children,
who color all sky and yard and house,
putting it together like a puzzle.
Surely here part of the puzzle is
Lost, or is part of something else.
But what is missed stays here
in what may be snow: that
path to the fourth dimension:
the city and the network of
friends and enemies who have been
taken out, who do not lead to this
cold elevation of self, where only
the priest and the novice are
always on the ascendant, leaving
things out of the world, finding
not things, but the negative forms
of things and color patches like footprints,
whitening out, as it were, objects,
till only a few landmarks are left,
but just enough, so that they--and we--
can find the way back again through
the vanishing ground and the words in the margin
that mark the way.

The author of Lantskip, a collection of poems, and Lorenzo de' Medici: A Verse Play, Francis Blessington '63 teaches English at Northeastern University. This poem appears in his new collection, Wolf Howl (BkMk Press, 2000).


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