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.
Somewhere between the tired moon’s glow and my unfocused eyes
I keep seeing winter—snow heaps when it’s just a white van
Across the street; accumulation on the metal roof next door
instead of the bored shine of a lazy evening rain. Tomorrow
It’s spring, I know, and the rain outside should sound less
like ice and more like the first words of flowers and grass.
Wife! every night you cradle your guitar for an hour and put the spirits
in harmony. Come over here and pick me up! And put me back in tune.
I got close enough to the image
to see the street lamp and tree
And graveyard beyond it
So much easier these days to appear middle-aged!
Moon’s out walking too – only its topmost perimeter,
frosted white, is visible in this nearly spring blue noon sky.
Maybe that’s how I’m seen today
as I pass through quiet intersections:
almost invisible but for the borders of my graying temples.
日從東溟轉, 夜向西海沉.
The unhurried day drizzles, turns
westward and sinks beneath the sea.
羣物各已息, 衆星燦然森.
All things hold their breath, the stars
just right, glorious like the forest.
蝦蟇將食月, 魑魅爭出陰.
The toad on the moon eats,
the demons strive to come out of the clouds.
阮籍獨不寐, 徘徊起彈琴.
The city dozed fitfully, alone, hesitated,
then rose and picked up its instrument.
*
[Note: This is a first 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. As with the previous poem I shared, this will likely change greatly from its current state to a final accurate version more worthy of being called a translation. The method I’m following is unusual but feels most natural for me — To write an impression of the poem gathered into my own poem in English, and then to continue to write a poem in English, and another, with the hope that each one gets closer and closer to my friend Sheng-yu’s poem in its traditional Chinese characters, till they are at least close enough to nod at each other or share a bottle of wine. Chen Zhang, who is busy at Harvard finishing her dissertation while teaching as the Chinese Literary Preceptor up there in Cambridge, furnished me with the traditional characters for Mei’s poem. I will keep you updated on any new versions. ]
Tonight, with nothing to say, with all the absent things
crowding around me like a teapot with a parade
of friendly continental guards and crows encircles
tea from China, with all present concerns poured
into an empty cup and spilled for good luck
before drinking, with a mild wind from the south
whispering threats in another language to the last
of the hard-packed plowed snow on the streets,
I remind myself of nothing, and the long envelopment,
and the cup filling with jasmine and spring, and earth.
Rain melts snow then turns
to snow: earth slides soft
then stiffens and stills
and disappears under new snow:
Clouds ride endless wind
always leaving: unseen
and unmoved by the mess
and distance, something
of you and I makes its
own slow circle above
Warm March morning. The sky dropped a foot
of snow on us a week ago and now it rises
in the warm air as fog in the hollows and foothills
disappear as I drive through it. Tonight it’s coming
back down as rain which will be snow before it ends
and I’ll be bending my back to shovel it away
from my car. Three times I will have passed through
it in a week, this same stuff, reconfigured, recycled.
When they buried my uncle a few days ago I knew
if there is a soul it’s like this snow, form a phase only
with respect to specific conditions and maybe
for all that, still surviving, no memory, none,
recognition only a scent like snow before it snows.
Translations from the English 