What we want is the red kickball on the roof of the elementary school.
What we want is for someone to do what our teachers could not.
Go up there with a ladder
and toss it casually down.
What we want is for what we want
to bounce a little closer.
Last night I heard the first crickets of the year
and the first click and hum of air-conditioning units
five hours before my own calendar page turned over again–
I was in the woods of my mind, looking for a word that never lived
in the way some look for creatures that cannot be
where they have been seen though it cannot be doubted
something has been seen. By looking for this mystery
I was creating the word. Is this how love is created?
A word that suddenly obtains meaning and mystery
in the deepest neck of our woods? Five hours
from the fifty first anniversary of what I cannot remember
the machines and fans hijacked the night
lifted it in the bothered air like helicopters waiting
on every building to take off. But they never leave.
History just another season we can’t hear change
traveling as we are, faster than the speed of truth.
The mystery opens like the mouth of a wolf
and closes like bare feet running on a path
and in the middle is a window neither open nor closed
and a festival we can attend only as words to each other.
It spreads out like a spill against forgetting.
All the grounded helicopters
are silenced when the thunder knocks the power out
and people open their windows cautiously
one day closer to forgetting there was a night
without open windows and crickets.
The bare feet of a word prowl across my eyelids.
Each footprint is different, like a word in many languages.
I can still outrun my children
but the race has to be very short
or very long. And the middle space
widens every day,
We drove out of town in early spring
to visit a friend of my daughter
whose family makes church organs
among the folded hills of Virginia farmland.
There the metal is boiled and poured
in a long flat trough, so thin it can
be rolled into the pipes that channel
air into faith-appropriate pitch.
The cows leisurely await their doom
in the fields all around.
The sharp shinned hawk flies low
across the field and alights on an old post.
The family’s house is a crossroad of winds–
every stiff breeze in the valley seems to force
its way toward the house, from every direction,
speeding through foothill and gap,
funneled by finely ill-mapped roads,
reaches their yard finally as a constant gale
ripping the voice from trees and shrubs as we stumble
to the side door. My daughter’s friend
is used to it, she shouts from the porch, it never ends.
I think it is all the winds of the world auditioning
for a chance to flow through those pipes
and into the shadows of stillness
and be heard as something straight from God.
At home it is calm as a confessional.
The library across the street is closed.
We always have books to bring back,
and we always find them when the library
is closed. The silver maple next door
is so covered with English ivy it should be dead
but it has bloomed again this year,
enough to make the blue jay invisible.
I recognize his pitched query as others recognize
in the church organ the vowels of God.
I hear, in my own breath as I stand on the porch,
that same fierce longing as those winds
to become somebody else’s voice.
Sitting on the mid-afternoon porch
of your life, the day seems still.
Buildings not moving, memories
like distant clouds.
Then the sun moves, shadows
lengthen. The clouds
are getting closer.
Versions of a corner. Red flag sticking out of the earth
where painted lines on the grass meet. Past it
chest-high chain link fences knot into a right angle
before the ground drops twenty feet down
a scrabbly bank on which lines cannot be drawn.
Past the parked cars an uneven stand of poplar and pine
waving like a tired family. Are they greeting us
or waiting for us to drive out of sight?
Then the foothills
where our preferences end.
How is it that mountains always seem to appear
by surprise? or a big word gathering quietly
in our ear, a thing without corners
growing inside a thing without corners,
a soccer ball knocking over a styrofoam cup of coffee
in the way a day may be suddenly knocked on its side
by a force that seems utterly foreign to it.
Crouching to save what’s left
I see the soccer field lines
as cave drawings of wordless heights fallen
on their sides and flattened, flag pinned to the top.
Almost-full moon over skidding vapor trail.
A cat on the carpeted stairs.
A street-sign day with no direction.
Following is the Author’s Note to Moonlight & Shadow: An Imaginary Portrait of Mei Yao-ch’en, which collects the 38 poems about the time-traveling 11th-century Chinese poet Mei Yao-ch’en. Many of which appeared originally on this site, and it was the great response to the first handful of appearances by Mei that led to this book-length collection.
Moonlight & Shadow is being published as a limited edition of 20 copies, signed and numbered, in a large 11×14 format with hand-crafted covers bound in an ancient Chinese side-bound style by St Brigid Press. At the bottom of this post is a special ink to reserve a copy at a 35% discount. More information about the book and its design can be found on the Books page.
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MANY of the more intrepid readers of my site Translations from the English know that for most of 2014 I was at work on a sequence of poems about 11th century Chinese poet Mei Yao-ch’en, the premise of which includes me somehow transporting him in the midst of his forty-ninth year to that same moment in my life here in the 21st century; that as Sung dynasty poets tended to do, Mei and I thought time and distance less important than wine and friendship, and that he heroically and generously consented and contented himself with being a guest in my house (and millennium) for some undetermined duration, taking it upon himself to write home occasionally about his experiences, sometimes to his friend (and his brother in law’s son) Hsieh Shih-hou.
The poems in this book, then, are in Mei Yao-ch’en’s voice. The titles are in mine — in the absence of the proper writing materials, Mei records his thoughts on walls, towels, shower curtains, poster board, on the underside of a Christmas tree skirt, whatever is at hand, much like his predecessor Han Shan was said to scrawl his poems on rocks, trees, and monastery walls — and I translate and record them, adding long explanatory titles which are themselves the type of titles that were very much part of the social transmission of poetry of the Northern Sung dynasty of Mei’s time.
I call these poems an “imaginary portrait” because, of course, the words are not Mei’s, and while I’m not sure they are entirely mine, either, there is no one else about to take credit or responsibility for them; so they are those of a Mei of my own making, and they do across their breadth begin to sketch out a portrait of that poet for twenty-first century readers. Also, in the first and only book I was able to find about Mei’s life and work, the cover and verso of the half-title page are adorned with an image of Mei that is described as an “imaginary portrait” painted roughly six hundred years after his death. Honestly, I thought if someone could take a shot at painting the guy’s likeness after six centuries, could I trespass any more on the truth by trying to throw him a thousand years into the future and read his mind?
I was moved to write about Mei after reading wonderful translations by David Hinton and Kenneth Rexroth. Seeking out additional information I found the book mentioned above, Mei Yao-ch’en and the Development of Early Sung Poetry, by Jonathan Chaves. Published in 1976, it is a gold mine of biographical information, critical perspective, and translations of dozens of Mei’s poems. I found it just after I had written the first one or two poems about Mei and decided I’d write more.
In the spring of 2014 I made contact with Professor Chaves, who teaches in Washington, DC at George Washington University, to thank him for a book he wrote forty years ago. To my surprise anddelight, Professor Chaves responded the next day, and added: “In Spring of 2011 I visited Mei Yao-ch’en’s hometown of Hsuancheng / Xuanchang in Anhui Province, where a new monumental statue has been erected in commemoration of him.” He included photos of the monument in its in-progress state, which may by now have been completed. It’s good to know my old friend’s work is getting the attention it deserves.
I found additional insight into Mei’s life as a poet by reading The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song, by Colin S.C. Hawes. It contains several translations of Mei poems I have not found in translation elsewhere, and even more of Mei’s good friend and fellow poet Ou-yang Hsiu.
The Afterword of this book contains a translation of Mei Yao-ch’en’s poem “Night”. This translation is my own, done with the great help of Chen Zhang, who at the time of this writing was serving as Literary Chinese Preceptor at Harvard University, and who provided insight into the Traditional Chinese characters of the Sung dynasty poets. The sum of what Ms Zhang provided me in my struggle to translate a single poem of Mei’s is far greater than what shows up in the merit of the translation. I made this attempt mostly to introduce to readers of contemporary English-language poetry a poem of Mei Yao-ch’en’s which had never been translated before; to absorb directly an appreciation of the actual work of translation; and to offer it as a token of appreciation and gratitude to Mei Yao-ch’en himself.
Much of the great classical Chinese poetry is written in a style called regulated verse. The regulations of this form do not translate into any English form of verse, any more than Traditional Chinese characters translate to single English words or syllabic counts translate from Chinese to English. But I did gain some appreciation for at least the translated effects of regulated verse in the course of reading and re-reading thousands of wonderful poems from the T’ang and Sung dynasty, through the insightful translations of David Hinton, Red Pine, J.P. Seaton, Kenneth Rexroth, Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu, and others; and so the form that Mei Yao-ch’en ostensibily utilizes in this collection, called by me “unregulated verse,” does indeed have its characteristics, most of which pay homage, technically or thematically, to regulated verse and the themes and memes of that work, strained (much like the ancients strained their wine before writing their poems) through a sieve of centuries, and newly tainted with the road dust of the mere fifty years of this individual’s flawed vessel. The result of certain characteristics of this form may result in what looks like inconsistent punctuation and other anomalies. My only assurance is that there is a form, and for those seeming inconsistencies I’m willing to take full blame, knowing this is one of the perils of translating one’s own work. JS
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Ten of the 20 numbered and signed copies of Moonlight & Shadow are being offered for sale. For a limited time you can reserve a copy at 35% discounted price of $75 here.
Through a brick-lined alley where I read my life’s sentence
I step over a rivulet of snowmelt that flows behind me into the past
walking with an open cup of coffee in a soft cold rain
The moon’s not looking
out a window in
the house next door
to the west of bed.
Rising I talk the evening
down from its sorrows:
What begins as one thing
passes into another, I say,
sundown to dusk to night
for instance, night to
faintest light to dawn
to day. Then night says
in a voice so dark I can
not read its words
What begins as love
passes into love
and from the house next door
to the east of my steps
the moon rises
as from its black chimney
Translations from the English 