Soul Lake

Rain's night-long lashing makes the lake listen;
Fitfully it tends to lucency.
Yet the rippling of bleached lotus-bodies
Remains deep-sunk in sighing.

Similar things have happened in the pond in my hills,
Amidst the flicker of tree reflections, one sees a face at its centre
Glimpsed time after time when I've bent down over it.
While in a still more faraway, moistened

Dream, I see how I walk from the house
Watching the house's illusion, but nothing is there,
Only the pond on my roof immovably shining,
And over this there floats a layer of leaves.

Ah, maybe in all of my own recollections of the natural,
In still deeper slumbering vagrancy we two once crossed paths;
And so, when your pilgrimaging spirit hums gently in the air,
I fall down like stones, and, fallen, brim over myself.

SOUL LAKE