Read an Excerpt
Argument of Situations
I was thinking, while making love, this is beautiful—this
fine craftsmanship of his skin, the texture of wintry river.
I pinched him, three inches above his coccyx, so that he knew
I was still here, still in an argument with Fan Kuan’s
inkwash painting, where an old man, a white-gowned literatus,
dissolves into the landscape as a plastic bag into cloud.
The man walks in the mountains. No, he walks on rivers.
The man moves among shapes. He travels through colors.
The mountains are an addendum to his silvergrass sandals.
Wrong, his embroidered sleeves are streaklines of trees.
Neither could persuade the other, as my fingers counted
his cervical spine, seven vertebrae that held up
a minute heaven in my hand. But it isn’t important.
It is not, I said. It is just a man made of brushstrokes
moving in a crowd of brushstrokes. The man walks
inside himself. The string quartet of the tap water
streamed into a vase. My arms coursed around his waist.
We didn’t buy any flowers for the vase. It’s ok.
The sunlight would soon fabricate a bouquet of gladiolas.
To walk on a mountain for so long, he must desire
nothing. Nothing must be a difficult desire. Like the smell
of lemon, cut pear, its chiseled snow. The man
must be tired. He might. He might be lonely.
He must be. The coastline of his spine, the alpine
of his cheekbone—here was where we stopped—this
periphery of skin, this cold, palpable remoteness
I held. The dispute persisted. Are you tired? I’m ok.
That means you are tired. You’re bitter.
Whatever you say. If my hands departed from his skin,
the heavens would collapse. The limit remained
even though we had used the same soap, same shampoo;
we smelled like the singularity of one cherry’s bloom.
The vase stayed empty, the sky started to rain.
My toothbrush leaned against his.
The man must be lonely, I said. No, the mountain
is never lonely. Burying my forehead inside his shoulder
blades, the mountain is making itself a man.
Serenade behind a Floating Stage
My friend called and said that sex saved him. He made me listen to streets in the Philippines waking up in rain, panes and trees
repeating a low note of C—chorister, cage, a choir captures the cadenza of falling cardamoms, then a quartz of quietude.
So eventually, it was the Q—queer, he said, the parched skin of the quarryman, whom he loved briefly for an afternoon.
For so long, we’ve mistaken the Q for C, weeping, he then recited a passage of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, an odd, phonetic transcription
from the Tang dynasty. The power, he insisted, is in the sonance,
not in its meaning, its attachment. This persistent, desperate,
loud howl of August is but the insects’ thirst for mating and survival. The naked nearness of a swimming pool pulses
in blue, so artificial it seems real. Wrongness, for years, my life depends on a false letter, and as consequence, instead
of the quiet, a cry drills the carnage of my heart. Had I chosen the path of Q, its hidden “you” might have entered me
with a silence, to which my heart would yield as the hollow inside an oboe. The cicadas continue practicing deft mastery
of invisibility. I join their quartet. Where the moon streaks through,
the night makes a sound of fabric being torn inside my head.
Dark and huge, it is frightening to be alive with a song in you.
If You Talk about Sadness, Fugue
1.
Paul Celan wasn't necessarily the saddest person in history. Trakl could have been sadder, though his sadness was personal.
The personal is unbearable.
2.
I returned to China in the summer and found summer didn’t belong there.
3.
The loneliest music is Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. My friend said,
It’s like drinking a bowl of Chinese herbs
in the dark.
4.
Schubert is non-existence.
5.
Trakl wrote, Your body is a hyacinth.
And Celan drank milk when the night came.
6.
This morning a boy in Syria, five years old, was rescued from the dust. He wiped his head and saw the blood, didn’t cry.
In front of the television, people wiped their faces draining with tears.
They didn’t bleed.
7.
In June, I bought a book of Silver Age poets: Akhmatova was the moon of Russian poetry. Pushkin, the sun.
8.
A girl, again in Syria, cried and raised her hands to surrender when a journalist took a photo of her. She thought the camera was a gun.
9.
I cried when I listened to Brahms. The dead became retongued.
10.
In August, my aunt drove two hours to my town, begged me not to be a poet. She read the poetry under my pillow and found out
Akhmatova's son was arrested. Gumilyov killed. Tsvetaeva went mad.
Everyone else exiled.
11.
My aunt said, We are still in a communist country.
I told her, I am already exiled by my family.
12.
The moon remembers; she witnesses in the dark.
I ask her to explain how we have forgotten to start with forgiveness.
13.
For that boy, the war never ends. He shall not be lonely.
He shall repeat that motion of wiping, of digging his mother out of dust, out of war-memory, brushing her hair stained with blood.
He doesn’t remember his mother’s name; he kisses her face.
14.
Schubert had the body of a hyacinth. He wilted so fast.
Trakl added, The last gold of expired stars.
15.
Celan’s mother died in the war; he wrote poems for her.
He wrote, It’s falling, mother, snow in the Ukraine.
Ukraine is the name of a place. His mother’s name is mother.
16.
I stopped writing poems, as my aunt had pleaded. I took the book back.
17.
I close my eyes and touch the book as if blind,
to feel how cold each word is on the page, how sharp, like shattered glass.
I am afraid no one can keep it from falling apart.
18.
The personal is unbearable. Someday, the moon will fall apart from her memories. All night, she stared at the fleeting water, then left.
Nothing remained except this calm stare of the ceaseless water.
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