Ninth century
The cloud road’s choked with deep mist. No one gets here that way,
but these Heaven-Terrace Mountains have always been my home:
a place to vanish among five-thousand-foot cliffs and pinnacles,
ten thousand creeks and gorges all boulder towers and terraces.
I follow streams in birch-bark cap, wooden sandals, tattered robes,
and clutching a goosefoot walking-stick, circle back around peaks.
Once you realize this floating life is the perfect mirage of change,
it’s breathtaking — this wild joy at wandering boundless and free.
Translated from the Chinese by David Hinton.