Adagio for Su Tung-p'o
2019
The Chinese Song Dynasty (960-1276) produced some of the greatest works of art and poetry that the world has known, and chief among the poets of this period was the remarkable Su Tung-p’o. The ease and fluidity with which his writing merges commonplace events into metaphysical apocalypses is stunning as well as philosophically stimulating. Many of the 68 poems in my Adagio for Su Tung-p’o were inspired by lines from Su Tung-p’o and bring a 21st Century application to his thoughts on time’s relationship with eternity, the natural world as a part of infinity, and physical frailty as a precursor to metaphysical immortality.
Sample Poems from Adagio for Su Tung-p’o
Billy Surels
The hundred rivers day and night flow on,
we and all things following;
only the heart remains unmoved,
clutching the past.
— Su Tung-p’o
Who wouldn’t clutch at a love that once glided past?
Even an early, long flown love that I knew wouldn’t last
and for which I was shamed, shunned, derided.
The boy, dangerously beautiful, still stands cocky, sure,
his flannel shirt open, his lop-sided smile at coy play
with my heart, and he demands a memory or two. Even
at this remove, all my life has not been enough to inure
against remembrance of his eyes, lips and callow voice.
This ill and old, this far downstream, what should I do?
Forget? Oblivion may be a wise choice for all that’s past,
but I will hold on my departing day a recall of a first taste
of vanity and uncanny bliss, leaving behind the waste
of space and time, but cleaving to a lovely thing that also
couldn’t last, clutching my evanescing memory of his kiss.
Finding Your Way
Rivers and mountains all empty clarity: there’s a road in,
but caught in the dust of this world, I’ll never find it again.
— Su Tung-p’o
Any road worthy of travel isn’t away from, but toward.
Cluttered cities of clustered people offer entrances
but nary an exit. Every load of baggage begins as
just a want or need. Each hoard of material goods is dust
blocking a door, locking a gate, mocking a minimalist creed
of letting go, giving away, giving way, accepting fate,
emptying mind, surmising “should” from “shouldn’t,”
physical gain from the metaphysical “I” refined and rising.
Journey not of this world, though in this world. Rise and walk.
It does not matter where. See before you the ugliest of openings.
Judge not. Clarity could be there. Talk silently with your senses
alone. Let charity be one virtue you hone, honesty one virtue
you own, fortitude one virtue that makes you strong as stone,
and let love, love, be the one sin for which you must atone.
Returning Home
The year is drawing to an end.
The leaves are turning golden.
I want to go home.
I want to go home.
I have loitered round the mud flat for too long.
— Su Tung-p’o
In the end of everything, in the end, everything
becomes useless or stale or unprofitable, youth
being a commodity unavailable to those whose
five senses are becoming senseless to the truth
of aging, to the year drawing to an end, to gold
as a funereal color foretelling snow, to news
that a dying year is done with struggling to be
bold in the face of oblivion and pines for rest.
Home? Proverbially, that’s where the heart is,
but it’s really where memories are, and the test
for locating home is a simple one: recall a face
for which the pulse quickened, time was undone,
and the dark space between you was overthrown.
There’s home, even if ghostly in mud and stone.
