The Way of Water
I tried to name the water
but it slipped the word.
What I held became shape,
what I let go became river.
The river flowed
and met its barriers.
It bent but did not break,
moved on,
and time fell behind.
A stillness gathered,
so complete
it forgot it had moved.
There the river became sky,
a mirror scrubbed of clouds.
The stillness opened into silence
deeper than silence,
and I stepped inside.
I became that hush,
and it filled me
not with thoughts
but with the taste of empty air.
I tried to speak,
but words were stones
dragging the current backward.
I broke the sentence,
let the water pass,
and meaning dissolved
into everything that is nothing.
Far off a flame trembled.
I walked toward it.
Its light scalded my eyes
so I closed them.
When I looked again
the flame had thinned to an ember,
then slipped into the dark.
I returned to the river.
It did not remember me.
It held no memory, no scar.
It only flowed
around the stone
where my name once clung
like moss.
A Conversation
A horizon rises,
fragile but certain,
like the first word of a poem
that has not yet chosen its language.
Above it, faint particles drift,
small as breaths,
moving through the quiet
as if guided by a pulse in the paper.
They stitch a thin path
between two distant spaces
that recognize each other
without ever touching.
Their language is ancient.
No nouns, only qualities—
shadowed, trembling, ascending,
the way ink becomes a landscape
before it knows it is one.
Each adjective leans closer
to the truth than any name could.
Each one opens a door
to what the marks are becoming.
Time does not enter here.
The strokes are still deciding
what they want to be,
and the world waits with them,
unhurried,
eternal,
held together
by the soft gravity
of recognition.
Forms of the Nameless (triptych)
I. 花 (Huā)
I asked:
What is this?
She paused, then said:
A delicate stalk rising from the blank expanse,
crowned by a frog—or is it a flower?
Another voice added:
The emptiness isn’t absence.
It is presence distilled.
I see it now.
It is neither flower nor frog,
but the moment it becomes,
or the instant after it fades.
A whisper of creation:
everything happens
in the breath
between being and nothingness.
It is not a word.
Not a noun.
Not The Word.
It is silence
creating what it wants,
not what you want.
II. 道 (Dào)
A single line on paper,
rising, bending, returning.
The brush hesitates
but does not stop.
It moves as water moves,
without searching.
Between start and end,
no origin,
no destination.
The Way.
III. The River Moves Upwards
The river moves upwards.
A stone interrupts—
she flows around it.
Her strength thins,
but does not fail.
No one knows
where the line began.
It continues,
sorting pebbles and dust,
moving beyond what the eye can follow.
Colorless.
Odorless.
Speaking a language
that cannot be deciphered.
It wakes him.
“What have you drawn?” he asks.
“The one that cannot be named”,
she says.
“But isn’t drawing naming?”
“Yes”, she answers,
“but only what cannot be named
knows what I have drawn”.
Writing in the Sky
She called it writing in the sky—
marks of a language
that does not stay.
The ink descends like rain,
but never quite falls.
My first impulse is to read it,
to make it say something.
Perhaps its saying
is its being.
She smiles,
and the wind moves through her sleeve.
“You, too”, she says,
“are the Tao
looking for itself”.
Zirán 自然—
and the paper breathes.
Breathing the Same Sky
Marks on the sky,
some near,
others already thinning.
No pursuit.
No center.
Only breath
finding breath
where it can.
Nothing gathers them.
Nothing disperses them.
They share
the same air,
unevenly.
The Tao
is not what joins them,
but the distance
each one keeps
without effort.
© All works by Le Nghi Teng
© All text by Jorge R. G. Sagastume
Artists & Writers in This Issue
In alphabetical order by the first name
