FLOATING ON A MARSH

Autumn
the sky huge and clear
the marsh miles from farms and houses

overjoyed by the cranes

standing around the sandbar
the mountains above the clouds in the distance

this water
utterly still
in the dusk

the white moon overhead

I let my boat drift free tonight

I can't go home.

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LIPO
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LIPO
He seems half-man, half-myth. The personality that informs the poems and
that is haloed by a long tradition of deep affection may once have been less
than legendary, but it can never have been ordinary. The Chinese have
valued Li Po for his gaiety, freedom, sympathy and energy for so long that he
has become a sort of archetype of the bohemian artist and puckish wanderer.
The story that he drowned when he drunkenly tried to embrace the moon in
the river is doubtless apocryphal, but it is also delightfully apt to anyone who
knows his work; and the scholar who protested that the poem addressed to