Tape adheres to my right arm.
I sit across from the clinic
deliberating over coffee and scone.
Good thoughts, friends, diet and exercise
can’t save me from an errant
thyroid, rebellious prostate gland,
defiant glucose numbers.
Days will pass, results
will swirl with other data.
I will pick through the flotsam
and try to decide
what must be
done.
(No. 96 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)
So here we all sit, waiting for our “results.”
When to hold, when to fold? How to try strongly to influence events, but with a view toward acceptance? It seems to call for, as Stephen Mitchell once noted, a sort of double vision. “Holding two contradictory views is like looking out of two eyes: the only way to achieve depth.”
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.) Special note: No. 96 appears only in the Shambhala Pocket Classics edition of Burton Watson’s Cold Mountain.
