THE VISIT

“If,” Yang Wan-li said, “you look back
at Hui Mountain from P’an-feng,
it really has the shape of a dragon.”
And I asked “Do you mean ‘really’

as in ‘This isn’t just poetry?”
But he, a poet dead
in 1279, didn’t answer.
I try to think of other things

that happened in 1279, but
come up blank. 1280 is a zero too.
Okay, let that year sadly be
the year that one thing happened.