63” x 50”, oil on canvas

Private Collection

Only mountains should judge the dead.

But what if their greenness never ends?

Rain, mountains and cloud eliminate salvation,

the present is declared in the hissing rain.

But I am not despairing over this life alone.

Day by day the dead advance as the living recede.

Half my friends are ghosts,

Not living souls on not to be measured roads.

Hands that reach out of the past

to touch what made it possible.

But my words are like starlings

and so death itself is without rest.

I had lost so many friends. The idea that only mountains should judge the dead seems somehow right to me, but what right would they have, if their greenness never ends? It seemed I could speak of this, through Pain Not Bread’s words, stitched together from several different poems. Pain Not Bread’s poems borrowed from critical introductions and translators’ forwards to Wang Wei and Du Fu, the great Tang poets, and radically reworked them. It seemed we could speak our minds through the words of others.