"In the poems I love there are sailboats taking lonely Chinese poets away from other lonely Chinese poets" (page 41)
-- Jim Moore, poet, "In the Poems I Love"
All roads lead to Rom. Along the roads, and in Rom itself, Li Bai and his poetry, not to mention his swordmanship and his drinking, met like-minded people.
In Europa he became known as Li Tai Po, or just Li Po. Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa knew him as Rihaku, as he was called across the Yapon Sea.
Just as all roads lead to Rom, all woods lead to the Wood.
It was Deep Magic that changed the back of the Wardrobe to meld into the woods of Narnia, into which Lucy strode then at the Lamppost met the Faun. And it was in the wild romantic Bohemian Forest, that Cinderella received the hazel branch her mother had paid for, and she still had three hazelnuts in her dress pocket now.
In every wood, as you walk deeper into its center along the crunch-crunch path of leaves or needles or snow, of its muddy ways or earth dug up by the noses of boars, looking up at the tall trees on both sides that almost meet, cathedral-like overhead, leaving only a strip of bright blue sky or night’s starry eve, you have the possibility of entering the magical Wood.
Whether you started on a Neverland floating in the Baltic sea, or the Qinling mountains of Shaanxi, or by the river in Elgin, Illinois, or from the suburbs of Berlin, you always have the possibility.
Climbing the Sandstone Mountains along the Painter’s Way, with three hazelnuts in her dress pocket and a green cap adorned with feathers on her head, Cinderella was leading Li Bai, also known as Li Tai Po, to the Deep Magic of the Wood. As they crossed the seamless threshold between this wood and That, far away in Cathay, his friend Du Fu, hungry and impoverished, felt it.