"but if you try sometime / you just might find / you get what you need"

[larryhammer]

My default for when I have nothing else to say seems to be to post another of these. This may be a dangerous habit.


4. Mêng - Discovering

How can a spring fresh from the mountain-side
know where to flow? Sometimes, it can't decide,

turning this way and that, bubbling over
and through a watercourse once left by older

streams, questioning every rock and boulder
as it burbles through what it can discover

*
till, misled by some low gap, it gushes
a dead-end hollow. There it must wait, quiet,

and curse behaving like a freshet fool.
It slowly fills its puddle to a pool

until it's full up to the lip of riot
and bursts through and on, and downward rushes.


(In case it's not clear: the formal conceit with these is that each yang line of the hexagram, reading down, corresponds to a couplet with so-called masculine ending lines (a beat), and each yin to one with a feminine endings (an off-beat).)

---L.

Comments

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

lovely

[larryhammer]

Thankee.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That is an awesome conceit.

[larryhammer]

It's certainly been useful for testing the proposition that the I Ching is a fruitful source of generative imagery.

---L.