He has to reach us intellectually to inform us that instead of writing about grief, an image of "An empty doorway and a maple leaf"  should suffice.  This, of course, is the fundamental problem of those who wish their readers to avoid writing or speaking and instead grasp the physical world in some way.  Taoists, thousands of years ago, faced a similar problem when telling their readers about "those who know" and "those who don't,"  for they have to speak to tell us.

"Those who speak, don't know
Those who know, don't speak."




One last example is a poem by Jorge Luis Borges.  I've included it because of the title, but right now, I see little connection with the other poems mentioned above.  Perhaps after I meditate on it, I will cut through the mental fog.





 
Ars Poetica: Jorge Luis Borges 

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind’s days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours.

They tell how Ulysses, glutted with wonders,
Wept with love to descry his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of wonders.

It is also like an endless river
That passes and remains, a mirror for one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And another, like an endless river.
-- Jorge Luis Borges --
From Dreamtigers,  translated by Harold Morland