Buddha Reveals the Apocalypse to the Cowboy -- Evening Lounge -- The Path -- The Ten Thousand -- A Dream of Emptiness -- Tsunami -- Leaves -- Walking with Snakes -- A Monk's Ode to Guan Yin -- Guan Yin's Treatise on Compassion -- Damascus -- Flying -- If You Tell -- The Ancestors Speak to the Cowboy -- Interpretation of Tongues -- The Ancestors Explain How Envy Grew -- Scapegoat -- Elegy for the Appaloosa's Mother -- Against Forgiveness -- The Government of Nature -- For James -- The Pantry -- Germany, in the Fifties -- In the Park with My Grandchildren -- Remember -- At Lake Montebello with James -- Scrapple -- When My Heart Failed -- In Raleigh's Brownstone Hotel -- On Hearing Beethoven's Moonlight -- Looking Up from the Naked Bed -- The Touched -- The Untouched -- In Good Samaritan Hospital -- Driving South from Salem -- With My Family at Dinner on Easter Sunday -- Evensong at Christ Church -- Washing the Car with My Father -- Petunias -- Cold Mountain -- Passing through Indian Territory -- Predators -- Weeping Willow -- 1963 -- Drowning -- A Nightmare -- To Those Who Would Awaken -- The One Song of He Nan Monastery
Summary
This is the second volume of a trilogy (the first was The Plum Flower Dance) in which the poet analyzes his life, striving to become the ideal poet. He explores the trauma of his childhood - including sexual abuse - using a "cartography and thematic structure drawn from Chinese spiritualism." The poet is a practitioner of Daoism, and this collection deals directly with the abuse in the context of Daoist renderings of nature as metaphor for the human body
