I’ve been reading the Big Red Book of Twentieth Century Chines Literature. Wonderfully eye-opening, with poets and novelists who are famous in China, but whom we’ve never heard of here, and really rather minimal-to-no political pandering. This is one of my favorites.
I think therefore I am a butterfly…
The soft call of a flower ten thousand years later
Has passed through the dreamless unwaking mist
To make my multicolored wings vibrate
Translated by Gregory Lee
If one thing is as good as the next,
if, returning to the nest, the hawk finds
nothing changed though some infinitesimal
bit of mouse has become fledgling,
if time is measured mostly in breaths
until even they fade to nothing,
replaced by sunrise and sunset,
if all this is true, there’s room for
some small satisfaction at the movement
of air from the passing blade of the reaper,
having missed once more.
Maybe there’s nothing more than this
to immortality — the thin, movable wedge
between life and death.
“I see portents, omens.
Nothing is as it seems,
everything requires
constant re-interpretation.”
Does it seems like that, then,
to your eyes?
I see the diamonds in your sky
glisten and fall,
neglected.
Overheard: “Religion is fashionable these days.”
I’m going Hassidic, man,
Black hat, long curls
Slip-sliding down my ears,
Prayer thing, all fringy,
Hanging out my waistcoat
Or maybe Mormon,
White shirt, black tie
In the high summer heat
Bike oil staining my cuffs
If that don’t work,
I might go Amish
Dress like I just busted
A long term sentence
Begun in 1850,
Drag my plow horse to work
Every God-given day
Or Catholic?
They got nothing except
For priests, and I’m no priest
Got no taste for boys
Got up in cassocks
Nor desert stuff for me
Got no taste for heads
Wrapped or unwrapped
Attached or unattached
I’d consider voodoo
But my juju
Is lame and those
Blazing beads radiate
Way too much heat
Or, on second thought, no.
I got no style for this kind of stuff
That time was dark
A world of silhouettes, cigarette smoke,
A place where light faltered,
Intimidated, burdened
With the smell of whiskey,
The taste of luxurious defeat
Swilled like fine wine gone sour.
The wind blows tough at night
When only fear lights the hollows
Of something like despair.
So here we are, the last of us,
Swizzle-eyed and weary,
Surviving escapees from
What can only be recalled dimly.
I look in the mirror and ask,
Was that really you?
exiles child 