In Shanxi province, China, there is a mountain, Wutai Shan, which means “Mountain of Five Terraces.” It is said that Manjusri, the bodhisatttva representing wisdom, resides there, centered between Buddha’s eyebrows. 

So it is not insignificant that the poem for which this collection is titled, “Five Terraces,” occurs almost dead-center in the book, for wisdom is what you find at its heart, its center. Consider some of the subjects she explores throughout this collection: the complexities of love, the death of a parent, the death of a child: all of these imply a circumnavigation of the heart, and an excavation of it.   

Five Terraces is divided not into five sections as I had imagined, but seven. This initially surprised me, but I have come to see the opening and closing sections – both titled “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll” – as sort of  beginning and ending punctuation. But rather than end-stops or exclamation marks, they act as ellipses for thought that begins before you enter the book and continues after you have set it down.

This is very much in the spirit of the scroll’s title. According to the end notes, the title of the room-length horizontal scroll by Ming Dynasty artist Wu Wei, Le Grande Fleuve a perte de vue, “Translated from the French translation from the Chinese, the title means, approximately, “the great river as far as the eye can see,” or, more evocatively, “the great river to the loss of sight or view.” 

 In an interview with the Southeast Review, Ann Fisher-Wirth references a Buddhist metaphor for the universe as “mountains and rivers without end,” which is how she sees the scroll, and her poem, which both contain an expansiveness, an openness, that paradoxically draws the reader in.          

	You could be the man in the small house making tea, or one of the friends fishing off the footbridge of the river.
	*          *          *
	You could be that aspen, that cedar —
	or the woman we do not see, who spins thread or boils silkworms
	in the house below the boulder, the house
	of which we see
	an upper roof corner, and another, then the rocks surround it.

“Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” when encountered as the last section of the book, appears in reverse order, and has the effect of lifting us gently back out, but as an opening sequence, it zooms us in:           

	And look, here someone rides home –
	or is it a squiggle —
	up the path to a terraced house.
	Then a village fading in fog,
	on the watery side of a mountain.

As the observer is drawn in to each individual scene on the scroll, we are drawn in to the house, the village, the people in that village.

Wu Wei, in addition to being the artist referred to in the title, is also a major tenet of Taoist philosophy, which means, roughly, Wu (without) and Wei, (action). But Wu Wei  does not imply apathy,  but rather an instinctual kind of control, summed up best by the phrase wei wu wei, or action without action. It has also been described as the art of letting be. So “Walking Wu Wei’s

Scroll” can be taken as both the literal walking back and forth the poet did while admiring the scroll, and also the precarious ropewalk of “the art of letting be.” 

Grief, no small topic, appears and reappears throughout. Here is an excerpt from “Anti-Elegy,” which appears in section IV:           

	(...)I’m willing
	to say death’s a gift. But how lonely, to wait –
	then afterward, to shift and mumble grief’s bones.

And, then, “But the Bodhisattva Comes”:          

	But the bodhisattva comes
	to teach us the path through suffering.

So here is the wisdom borne of grief, of suffering. She explores this theme further, alongside others like sexuality in the face of aging, in the section titled, “The Trinket Poems.”

In April, 2002, the University of Mississippi assembled an exhibition featuring memorabilia from Mississippi-born Tennessee Williams’ career. It was during this time that the university put on a production of his little-known short play titled “The Mutilated,” which featured Ann Fisher-Wirth as Trinket Dugan. The experience of playing Trinket proved fruitful, resulting in a chapbook-length series of poems that draw us in to the actor’s life, both on and off stage, as she becomes Trinket. There is a sometimes sweet, sometimes crude, frankness to many of these poems. Here are the opening lines from “After Many Years She Returns to the Stage in “The Mutilated,” by Tennessee Williams”:          

	She runs her fingers over the cheek and down the throat
	and slender chest of this boy
	fuck age-appropriate
	fuck that she’s a professor it’s not specific to him anyway
	she arches her body against him and moans
	when he orders her be my slave and God she has
	climbed inside delirium

As she moves deeper and deeper into her character, the transformation begins to overtake her, as in “Small Interlude, Still, Where She Argues:”          

	Hang on to the real, she said to herself,
	this is getting full of gods and Sailors.
	You can’t just admit they’re college kids,
	you’re an English professor and mother of five
	slumming in satin, fake fur, and grease paint?

Each section is self-contained. Some poems in this collection haul up the detritus – stuff that most of us would rather have left buried – and turn it into something shining, something sharp, worth holding on to even if it hurts. “Mississippi,” a poem in eight sections which takes us away from the speaker’s home in order to lead us back, opens with:         

	Since Friday a small white cat has lain on the sidewalk next to Inside
	Oxford. Ants crawl in its fur, ichor pools around its nostrils. Soon, that
	sweet smell will rise as it bloats in the heat and stiffens further. Drive by
	it, drive back at the end of the day. No one has removed it. Drive by
	again next morning, then, in the evening, walk up close to look at it. Its
	eyes have spread from temple to temple, as if someone had laid the blue
	wings of a Morphos butterfly tenderly across it.

This is the stuff we cannot look away from. There are things we cannot defy, or define, as in the poem, “Rain:”         

	She has words for the others. Husband, friend, child... But what do you
	call a man you love, a man who loves you, who is not your husband and
	not – because of your husband, his wife – your lover? Not my love, and
	not my other love either. Not sweetheart, she doesn’t quite dare. Not,
	God forbid, my temptation. Though she’s been tempted.

To return to “Walking Wu Wei’s Scroll,” there is a particularly resonant line:          

No climax, no conclusion.

We are in the gallery:         

	And half the people walking the scroll
	here at the Grand Palais on the 21st of June
	move left to right, and half move right to left.
	It doesn’t matter

Of the poem, Ann Fisher-Wirth states in her Southeast Review interview: “I like to think that, like the scroll itself, one can enter the poem anywhere and find it sufficient and complete at every moment...” The same can be said about the whole of Five Terraces.

I am writing this on the 21st if June.