How he writes -- What it is like to read the ancients -- Always in these ancient Chinese paintings -- On the road to Buddhahood -- After thirty years -- Another kind of travel -- Quiet and seldom seen -- North is nowhere -- A stillness, absolute, profound -- How -- Where I live -- Nothing much -- When I came to Judevine Mountain -- In the ancient tradition -- The progress of ambition -- Like the clouds -- The three goals -- Bathroom reading: After a poem by Han Shan -- After reading Meng Chiao's "Seeing off Master Tan" -- What would it be like? -- Which of them sees more clearly? -- No trail -- Variation on a theme by another recluse who also thought about ambition and the self -- Alone and lonely -- Three decades -- The story of Chi Mu Chian -- Another lie -- As in Ryokan's brushwork -- You false masters of serenity -- The music of my own kind too -- For Wang Wei -- Home -- An unassuming grandeur -- When I get depressed -- My fifty-eighth birthday I write two poems: first one: what keeps me here? -- Second one: I am still here because for example -- The story of Yu-ling -- Li Po and Wang Wei -- Be glad -- How and why you should be circumspect about your inner life -- Dilemma -- So says Wang Wei -- How it is -- What's the difference? -- Bugs in a bowl -- Such self-indulgence and sloth! -- Ryōkan was a beggar.
After Li Yi -- My face -- My old woman -- After reading a poem from The Book of Songs -- Letter to Ni Tsan -- After Ryōkan's poem called "White hair" -- The cycle of the seasons -- All of us -- Trying to be who I already am -- My fate is to rebel -- Flawed verse: after a poem by Han Shan -- An age of academic mandarins -- Note to myself -- Which? -- Pao Chao and now -- Teapots as visions of how poetry and the world might be -- Part six. The sixth of January -- Snowshoes on Judevine Mountain -- Laid up in bed -- What happened today: the twentieth of January -- Haiku and Tanka for Shrike -- The first green of Spring -- After a walk on a gray, drizzling, cold Spring morning: the thirtieth of April -- What I did today: the sixth of May -- During the warblers' spring migration, while feeling sorry for myself for being stuck here, the dooryard birds save me from my melancholy -- The end of winter -- After reading Ou-yang Hsiu's poem called "Spring Walk" to the pavilion of good crops and peace" -- What good does it do? -- All summer -- Ahimsa next time maybe, or the Taoist Mountain recluse stands in his summer garden and says to the deerfly about to bite him -- The young woodchuck -- To a friend -- Old red beard, my friend -- Old poet refuses to leave home -- One summer afternoon many years ago while visiting my friend Joel, who is dead now, at his house which we called the depressive poet's rehabilitation center, I wrote this poem -- After Labor Day -- Harmonizing with Tu Fu's "Written on the Wall at Chang's Hermitage" -- Autumn and crickets -- For owl wing -- After reading Po Chü-i's "drunk, facing crimson leaves" -- Stillness, o stillness -- Melancholy thoughts -- All the raucous birds of summer -- Calling for Po Chü-i -- In Ryōkan's company -- Small song of praise at Christmastime for chickadee -- A winter night -- Who I love -- Quoting T'ao Ch'ien -- On hearing that these poems would be published in a book -- What Issa heard.
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