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Mild Winter in a Vietnamese Buddhist Monastery
Winter leaf,
dark
with becoming,
you release onto my waiting fingertip
a
small earthworm,
murky groping river
on my pale
skin.
Behind me, a presence,
unwanted, I think, and release the earthworm shyly,
but
I turn to find a kind-faced older nun.
She
taps my shoulder
and
asks
in
her thick, tangy, musical accent,
"What
are you doing?"
"I'm
writing."
"Writing
for what?"
each
syllable bouncing and sharply sweet.
"For
the leaf."
I show her, and she sees,
it
must be, she sees
on your dark, brittle surface
this
delicate light place
where the pigmented layers have flaked away,
leaving beneath a fine white-boned webbing
with the smallest mesh of openings in its lacework,
through
which one sees, beyond,
the patchy new grass of this rainy winter.
And,
"Beautiful," the nun says,
bending,
the
edge of her woolen robe
brushing
against my arm,
and
she shows me another thing-
"Trang
den," she says, "trang, den."
"Black,
white."
She
closes her knobby brown hand lightly around mine,
where
I hold the leaf by its firm, dry stem,
and
turns it over slowly in my hand,
revealing
its lighter underside,
all
pale-veined and whitish grey.
"Trang,
den," she tells me,
"black,
white, is the life."
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