The Ürümqi Placenta Poem

telephone gray bone
will it call?
will it call Tibet on the party line?

toe
the party line...

John Scott Russell observed a solitary wave
in the Union Canal in Scotland

He reproduced the phenomenon in a poem
and titled it

"The Wave of Translation"

somewhere in 1735
a Nommo appeared to the 7th Dalai Lama
Kelzang Gyatso as he returned from exile in Kham
to Lhasa

like a luminous conical fish
the Nommo hovered in the air
before his haggard holiness

the Nommo asked Kelzang
to give an example of a 'humorous wisdom'
but the Dalai Lama was very tired
from his long day of traveling
and could only think of something
an obscure painter of the future might say

'the more chaotic the world
the happier is the man of virtue'

Dispersion and non-linearity can interact
to produce permanent and localized wave forms.
Consider a pulse of light traveling in glass.
This pulse can be thought of
as consisting of light of several different
frequencies. Since glass shows dispersion,
these different frequencies will travel
at different speeds and the shape of the pulse
will therefore change over time.

a Nommo
more than a wave
is like a song in the air

left-handed
in the beautiful pasture