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]
1.
Spring storms roam across the valley.
On the maple, leaves appear like gypsy tents.
Wind off the mountainside ruffles the green edges:
inside one of the leaves sits a woman at a fortune telling table
laying the lone card of summer face-down.
Mary Tang wrote me today to share a Chinese translation of my poem “For Tomas Transtromer.” For more information about my call for translations of this work, see the Translate This Poem page. On the composition of the translation, Mary writes, “My translation of your poem from English to Chinese was spontaneous and took little time. To me some poems translate themselves into Chinese; other can never be.” Find out more about Mary on her site here. Thanks Mary!
*
路上的冰
影出你我
眼中所見
一般無奈
無法轉向
南部遠冬水盡
跪倒一行古柏
像一隊累了的兵人
失去了重舉的志願
他們背後
鱷寇稱王
我在千里之外的寒春麥田
望見無聲未覺的風暴逼近
深信萬物可失
像腦中的浮現
像夢中的呼叫
–縁盡
風以暴力
能否聽到
你我心聲？
與我同在
面向將來
(c) Mary Tang
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
Translations from the English 