Your mistress, that you follow whores, still taxeth you:
'Tis strange she should confess it, though it be true.

Your image is engraved
on the face of my watch
It is engraved on each of the hands
It is etched on the weeks
months years
My time is no longer mine

Your home is deep in the white clouds:
the green of mountains faces your gate.
The trees are thick, their flowers bear fruit;
the earth is warm, the bamboo has grandchildren!
Monkeys hang from withered pines, snapping the branches;
oxen trudge into the shallow stream, muddying the water.
You say that since you've gone into retirement
you can't bother talking to vulgar people.

Your eyes are like a night of rain
in which ships are sinking
and all I wrote is forgotten
In mirrors there is no memory.

It was not the wind — the oil is gone;
I hate the lamp that will not see me through the night.
How hard — to make ashes of the mind, to still the body!
I rise and move into the moonlight by the cold window.

The younger Van Eyck
Was christened Jan, and not Mike.
The thought of this curious mistake
Often kept him awake.

Young men dancing, and the old
Sporting I with joy behold;
But an old man gay and free
Dancing most I love to see;
Age and youth alike he shares,
For his heart belies his hairs.

The young fiddlehead ferns
lift up their tight fists,
in the spring wind
shaking them
right in the face of the mountain

A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife.
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

You work fast in the morning, ladies, as you plant the seedlings.
Reap them this fall, pile them in the storehouse.
Plant early rice, and the stalks will put on ears first.
The stalks have leaned toward the storehouse — rustling, they've leaned.
From the stalks piled this year in the storehouse, we'll get seed.