I have come back to Princeton three days in a row

to look at the brown sparrow in the apple branch.

That way I can get back in touch with the Chinese

after thirty years of silence and paranoid reproach.

It was painted seven hundred years ago by a Southerner

who was struggling to combine imitation and expression,

but nowhere is there a sense that calligraphy

has won the day, or anything lifeless or abstract.

I carry it around with me on a post card,

the bird in the center, the giant green leaves

surrounding the bird, the apples almost invisible,

their color and position chosen for obscurity—

somehow the sizes all out of whack, the leaves

too large, the bird too small, too rigid,

too enshrined for such a natural setting,

although this only comes slowly to mind

after many hours of concentration.

On my tree there are six starlings sitting and watching

with their heads in the air and their short tails under the twigs.

They are just faint shapes against a background of fog,

moving in and out of my small windows

as endless versions of the state of darkness.

The tree they are in is practically dead,

making it difficult for me to make plans

for my own seven hundred years

as far as critical position, or permanence.

—If the hanging scroll signifies a state

of balance, a state almost of tension

between a man and nature or a man and his dream,

then my starlings signify the temendous

delicacy of life and the tenuousness of attachment.

This may sound too literary—too German—

but, for me, everything hangs in the balance

in the movement of those birds,

just as in my painter

his life may have been hanging from the invisible apple

or the stiff tail feathers or the minuscule feet.

I don’t mean to say that my survival

depends upon the artistic rendering;

I mean that my one chance for happiness

depends on wind and strange loyalty and a little bark,

which I think about and watch and agonize over

day and night

like a worried spirit

waiting for love.