Sex,sex,
Oedipus Rex,
Thieves will have a new master

The scroll spoke
in hand printed gothic
on stained cloth.
Abandoned
by the previous occupant
of my new pad
its words meant little.
Fresh from first-year
college dorm,
I hung it on my wall,
tried to live
by its meaning
for a
time.

Boulder, 1961

(No. 47 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)

I was seeking hard for something to live by, and for a while, just about anything mysterious would do. Fortunately, Alan Watts fell into my life a few months later.

(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)