What Li Bai Read

The Shijing, the Shujing, the Tao Te Ching,
aged more than a thousand years
even in the days of his boyhood,
in the days of the Tang emperors,
the past speaking to him,
and, balancing that pull of history,
the works of contemporaries,
his second wife, his friends,
Du Fu not the least of them—
absorbing, distilling,
rapt with wine,
falling for the Moon,
pressing it into poetry,
turning words on the lathe
of his talent
as if he were immortal.