Today, while I’m busy looking in at the world created by Larry Levis in his posthumous collection, Elegy, I’m glad to know that people like Diana Woodcock are looking out. In a way, both Levis and Woodcock work to give us a recollected world in order to show us what has been taken away. Levis meanders into the realms of thought, but returns to the world with the sharpness of someone who has witnessed loss. Woodcock never strays from the scene at hand, an act of witness that gives the reader some chance to know the weight of her sorrow.

Diana Wookcock’s chapbook, Travels of a Gwai Lo is included in By Way Of and she’s graciously allowed us to reprint a poem from her latest chapbook, Mandala. I hope you enjoy the poem as much as I have. —Matthew Nienow

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FOR LHASA

March 17, 2008 I could not shake
the thought of you in flames.
Throughout the day whispering
the names of those I know still
living in your center, on your
periphery. Felt your misery.
Smelled burning shops, overturned cars,
Chinese flags. Saw smoke rising like

incense over the Potala and Jokhang.
Heard the rumblings of a hundred
tanks moving through your hallowed
streets. Remembered the soldier
who narrowly missed me, knocking
me down-bicycle and body sprawled
on the ground as he sped past laughing.
Today I said it out loud to no one

in particular, to the nameless faces
in the crowd, “I never left you nor
loved any city more.” So tonight
I’ll fill seven prayer bowls, make a
mandala out of Arabian desert sand,
remember as I dangle my feet in Gulf
waters the source of the Ganges,
and wonder if indeed I am a certain

lama’s reincarnation. I’ll take that
long flight back, walk the famished,
enflamed road leading to the holy
city where I’ll rise up like incense,
a faithful wife burning on her husband’s
pyre because I can’t forget
you, most fragile tragic city of Tibet.

—Diana Woodcock

(first appeared in Atlanta Review)