"I dreamt that one day she would come with me

 On a trip like this, and now she is only dust."

The shape of the wind can be seen only in

What it touches.  So once it was with love,

The years become now the light gesturing

Through this old cottonwood tree's leaves

Where it leans over the water, a wash of

Sheen and sheer shimmer translucent as

The brushstrokes on a small scrap of silk

Worn thin in passing from hand to hand

Through a thousand years of others' lives

And loves, the words fading and fraying,

All separating into sheer strands again,

As does the wind now, and nothing moves

Or moving where it had been, still water

And the leaves composed in their light,

The cottonwood reaching out to the river.

I've come across a volume of translations of classical Chinese poems by David Hinton.  Over the years I've read many translations - Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley, Burton Wallace, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, even William Carlos Williams - and Hinton's are to my taste the best . . . everybody else is oolong tea and Hinton is jasmine, to stretch a metaphor.