Nocturne

I was reading The Woman in the Dunes but grew tired of its misanthropic tone—and all the sand.

I opened a book called Hermeneutics as Politics but found it too much absorbed in senseless rebuttals and criticism of positions that no one but an academic would take seriously in the first place.

I stepped out onto the deck. The waves have come up. (Who can say why? The wind was from the northwest all day today!)

The moon is full or close to it. Mars burns beneath Castor and Pollex—a third twin.

The surf thunders to its own irregular rhythm, rising and falling.

Take a deep breath, there are hints of tree spice in the frigid air.

The raft of ice that was hugging the shore last night is gone and the moonlight sparkles far out to sea.

Closer to shore it darts across waves that have not yet broken like a thousand fluid fireflies.

Returning inside to the poems of Po Chu-I, I read:
“…but for lofty sentiments, I stay close to things themselves,
Green moss, rock, bamboo-shoots, water lilies in white bloom…”