3.
Spring’s caravan keeps coming, without effort
like a casual daydream of autumn
lightened by pollen colored lenses
settles everywhere until you cannot remove
your spring eyes and realize the daydream
was winter. The mountain takes
on color like it’s coming down with something.
2.
Each time I clear the fence of another day
I am trespassing onto the future’s yard
Like the deer behind the house
alarmed to find open space by the trees leaping
fence after fence and just as quickly gone
[4.14.15]
No wonder at dusk I find you sleeping in the hollows
in the crook of the mountain’s arm: you had so much
to carry, so much to let go: yet you are unchanged
Under your house, in the middle of the night
the roots are spreading across your foundation.
The roots are not a solid base for the visible,
they have never claimed to be that, they have
never even spoken to you. What roots do
is reach out for available space, where roots reach
Is a place you cannot see but which you feel
pulled towards but you are not being pulled,
you are reaching further and further. Up above
your head in the unseen inside you are also reaching.
In the middle of the day the sky’s foundation
is laid again and you are reaching across it
without knowing because you are distracted
by an oak tree’s afterthought ankling out of the earth
And back in where the world is constantly displaced
by the unseen middle, unstraight path.
Untitled Moment in the Middle of the First Night of April
Incense rises up the wall
in front of my mother’s painting
A village clings to a cliff a thousand
white rooms open to the sun
No separation of inside or outside
to me this painting is a memory
Of her, about memory about how something
no longer exists but still exists
Like smoke from an incense stick
it is entirely spent lighter than air
More solid than the air we breathe
my mother painted it from a photograph
To learn perspective
I lie on my back on the eastern slope.
The clouds are close. Moving as if on an escalator.
When I get up, ten thousand blades of grass
do the same, rising slowly, bent in the middle
But straightening, unburdened.
When the ground is soft enough for the spirit to stretch
beyond the numbers of endings and the numbers of beginnings
And the numbers stiff in stone grow warm in the spring sun
the cemetery down the hill fills with people walking.
I can tell the ones who aren’t ghosts because they notice my children
playing on the one patch of stoneless level grass just inside the gates.
The other ones are distracted by an old song in their ears.
The other ones, the ones carrying a large number in their arms
that is always one number larger than the last number they had
when the number was invisible and weightless and fit in a back pocket.
Some numbers are meant to catch, it is why they are shaped like lures.
Zero doesn’t catch, zero falls out of your pocket and you never miss it
And when you see it fall out of the laundry with the dryer sheet
you don’t worry that it’s ruined the rest of the clothes. A young
couple walk past us, hop over a stone wall on the way
to photograph tombstones. We see them come back, leaving
a trail of decimal points like breadcrumbs. When you’re a ghost
that stops you in your tracks, and you pick one up like a penny
and then spend the rest of your life trying to decide if the point
goes to the left or the right of your number.
The one way sign can point in any direction.
At day’s end I find myself looking to the east
down my street to the city’s end and mountains
above the shadowed valley flaring up
like the texture of your hand’s palm
seen under a microscope for the first time.
From here you can see the ridges but not the lines
that determine health, love, children, fortune,
retreat, duration. Only at a distance
does a line put up a compelling argument.
Tonight a spring flurry is coming and though
nothing will accumulate there is more
than one way to measure the countless departures.
The one way sign can point in any direction.
Old pine tree seems the only one
excited by the first warm wind
Empty-handed, the others barely nod
at his hundred foot tall child’s soul
Who remembers the world with no flowers
no leaves no bees who knows
What was and knows what’s coming
日從東溟轉, 夜向西海沉.
From the east the day comes spinning, revolving towards
the strange west, where descending evening colors the ocean’s every drop.
羣物各已息, 衆星燦然森.
Every living thing is resting, or holding its breath, it’s hard to tell
on nights when the toad swallows the moon –
蝦蟇將食月, 魑魅爭出陰.
Starlight glinting from every pine needle – or is it a million swords
unsheathed, our demons striving to materialize out of the dark cluster?
阮籍獨不寐, 徘徊起彈琴.
Only you, my friend, sleepless, pacing in your room, can sense it; only you
with a word, or a wave across your zither, can turn the knife’s edge back into night.
*
[Note: This is the most recent draft of a work based on a poem of Mei Yao-ch’en (1002-1060), about whom I have written many poems on this blog. The first version can be found here. The three between that draft and this one were too incomplete to share, so I’m sparing you those.
My continuing thanks to Chen Zhang, Chinese Literary Preceptor at Harvard University, for her explication and patience. She not only provided a word-for-word translation but important historical and critical perspective that helped me locate this work closer to the heart of Mei’s writing; she also provided her own enthusiasm for this specific poem. Sitting alone with a cup of coffee a few days ago in a Panera Bread with a marvelous view of the twilight saturating the Blue Ridge, I found a way into this poem through the voice of the poet I have appropriated/channeled/imitated in nearly forty other poems that were not attempting to be translations. That voice I was so used to writing in already helped me re-imagine this most recent version, which I think may be closer to a true translation of my friend Sheng-yu’s work. Again, the idea to approach the poem that way came from Chen, who pinpointed so well the difference between interpretation and translation in my many amateur’s questions.
Ruan Ji (210 – 263) was a poet Mei admired. He was also, some might say, an accomplished ne’er-do-well born into a prominent family who was unafraid of leveraging that prominence and wealth to support his chosen vocation as a poet. Some stories about him include him staying drunk for over a month to avoid having to get married, and so impressing an elder in his family with his zither playing one evening that his reputation was upgraded to ne’er-do-well-who-plays-a-mean-zither,-and-that-has-gotta-mean-something. ]
Translations from the English 