A guest requested my verse on eight junipers, bearing a scroll of them to hang.
Unfurled, it covered the wall, a sight both startling and grand, drawing sighs from all around.
Beside them, stone rubbings bore names and forms, each claiming some connection, some tie.
Some, tall, leaned on each other, locked in struggle; some, broken, seemed to fall yet held their ground.
Stubborn branches twisted back with hidden strength; high trunks bowed down like coiling dragons' fists.
Tracing from root to branch to tender shoot, none grew straight up—all bent and slanted wide.
Thunder spent, wind stilled, rain clouds departed, serpents and dragons lay dead, still intertwined.
Claws, horns, tails, and manes—all fixed in place—only show their bodies winding up and down.
Who knows what they meant when alive? They hardly resemble ordinary trees.
No wonder fools through ages, wagging tongues, have called them divine, ascribed them to immortals.
One dragon, coiled and aged, immense and tall, is said to be Laozi's mount, by which he soared.
They say he rode a deer and trod this path; traces of hoofprints linger, linked in line.
Most likely scarred by scorpions, pecked by birds, or else some liar carved them deep in stone.
If Laozi could deceive men, that was luck—how could such tales ascend to cheat the heavens?
Even if Laozi's power let him rise, what luck had that deer to fly up there with him?
Among them, one tree stands especially strange: its bark against all reason twists leftward.
They say Laozi himself planted this one—I know that tale is surely forged and false.
If it were truly planted by Laozi's hand, one might explain it as heaven's will, perhaps.
Why did it not twist rightward in that age, as if to say the world is led by left-hand ways?
Why do the masses never probe or question, but加重 marvels, letting Laozi claim all glory?
Heaven and earth hold countless kinds of things—why this alone is odd, who made it so?
Pondering deep, no answer can be found; who can lift this veil to keep the world from doubt?
Taoist texts, wild and false, love empty tales; their reasoning stretches on, endless and vague.
People read once and are transformed, daydreaming of flight, lost in delusion.
Is it not because this tree long stood here, steeped in strange tales, itself transformed by lies?
Thus its form, life, and death, through times, have drawn amazed and pitying looks for their weirdness.
If earlier ages had not spared the axe, letting it grow old,夸大 its legend spread.
Fine timber born with it in the same year was half cut straight for fuel, burned to ash.
Relying on weird tales and falsehoods planted, it lived and died at last intact, complete.
Sparse leaves and branches cast no shade; straight wood won't pillar, crooked wood won't draw a cart.
Who keeps it safe, who tends it—what logic makes them spare it, never cast it off?
I have a foot of iron, hard and sharp, long forged into an axe and whetted on the peak.
Yet lacking haft, it's set aside unused; too lazy to beg cassia from the moon.