Buddha of Sokkuram, The

When light burns from the sea

to the mountain and the jewel

in the Buddha's white granite forehead

catches fire, the sun

plows everything silver.

He's looking at nothing,

his eyes are closed

the way we distance ourselves

to see more clearly.

Stone hushed against stone,

he's done with the welling up

and the ebbing

as in the Pieta, the forebearance

even of the toes

worn down and kissed into brightness.

If you follow the Kyongju road

to the bottom of the hill

where the kings are buried

you come to a huge black tulip

turned over. The bell

wouldn't ring when they cast it

so they melted it down

and threw a child in the molten bronze.

The dragon was appeased.

How big a fire does it take

for a small soul?

Or for a small girl's body

to burn away from its cry

until only the cry lasts

out of the hollow where her ribs were

calling her mother

if we believe such stories.

That was twelve hundred years ago.

Nobody strikes it now.

History is a reversible rug we turn over

when the colors fade.

It lies with its face to the floor

so that we let it happen to others

or in art.

What can I do

with the dailiness of shock,

mute as the etching of a woman

holding her dead child,

its almost fluorescent head fallen back

as if the neck were broken,

bones of her hand as in an X-ray

mapping her pain.

Light blooms from the body

of a child, its weightless presence,

and a woman who knows about loss

far into the future.

Her lap supporting the infant

is a buddha's lap.

I keep trying to put them

together

his weightless shoulders

and the silenced bell

color of morning on the stone

like light returning

to the skin of my body

when I wake

or the rim of the glass

beside my bed.

Even to emptiness

or grief

sliding down his right arm

where the hand rests easy across the leg

down the other

finger by finger

over the silky foot.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jan 1996
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved