Questioning

Dec.18-19, San Francisco

Sometimes you wake up at the night

Characters, from long lost memories in the childhood

Tread into your dreams

Their faces are gleaming in the darkness as the dim lights

You thought you have forgotten them

But suddenly you know they are so close, almost within your touch

Yet they have not aged

Their smiles put you in an anonymous chill

In the morning you walk out to the streets

The brisk winter air refreshes your battered mind

The sunshine is still bright

It lightens everything within your sight  

You whistle, imagining the smell of the fresh coffee and bread

Instead you see the blossoming flowers in the yard of your neighbor

Why do they have all these colors, all these shapes

It all happened over the night, commanded by a cryptic language of its own

There is a thin line between the past and the current

Between here and the other side

When you stare at the wall

Feeling the pulse of the stillness, listening to the sounds of the vanished

Time passes through your window

Leaving a taste of the untouchable

It knows flowers will wither; your phone will stop ringing

You close yours eyes in fear and cringe under the bedsheet

Between Languages

Taking my shelter in the castle of the Chinese

Characters, I gaze at their solitary images

There line up, passing through me, with shivering bodies

In a monotone rhythm of continuous fusillades

After the genocide, the characters are simplified

Leaving behind a pile of arms, legs and eyes

But the language can still walk

Mystery nurtures a famine, as well as

A future incapable of feeding our growing appetite

I share, and make choices with my own race

With my own accent, in a dialect

United by violence.  In the chaos of the ancient

And the modern, my month turns into crater ruins

My teeth fall to the emptiness

Such a scene, such a banquet! Chinese are

Spreading to the world. I have eaten up my share, then

I steal my ancestor’s, until

One evening, I was in the street, I saw

A group of Chinese chasing an American. I guess

They want to immigrate to the English territory

But English is only a class, a manner, a TV program

A department in our University, exams and paper

On the paper I find the resemblance of Chinese to a pencil

Scratching through a surface, worn out slowly

With ink, glasses, typewriter, keyboard

English is gliding through the China sky, making some noise

Here and there. We are already accustomed to abbreviation

And diplomacy, hamburger, forks, aspirin

These changes do not touch our skin or bones. English

Walks on the teeth, whitens Chinese. Therefore,

I brush my teeth everyday, as I am concerned with

Germs, hygiene, and comparison. I thus derive

Some oral pleasure, some bitter taste, and

Awareness of the subtle difference of every fleeting word 

This also affects my hand: It sticks into English

With two fingers apart, mimicking a letter

A victory of democracy, a Nazi experience of superego

A crack in a piece of history. History is all about

Stammering wars.  Opium war, uprising of the heavenly

Kingdom, the Boxers, the Republic, and finally, the communists

I don’t know whether they ever heard about

Shakespere or Yeats, but they knew how dangerous

A language could be. Its metaphor, it substance,

Its destructive aesthetics, exploded in Hiroshima, Saigon, and Belgrade.

But outside the language China has to ally with the West

This is such a dubious part of the history

I won’t know who is more absurd, history or me

A hundred years has gone. What really has happened?

Why do all these Chinese migrate into English

Managing to become foreigners, discarding Chinese

As a divorced wife, and a forgotten home in the broken mirror?

Why do I become a hermit in a Chinese lantern

Surrounded by the paper ghosts, with the disillusion of the English

While witnessing more Chinese metamorphosed

From hieroglyph into alphabets

Misfortune --To Holderlin

Misfortune  --To Holderlin                       

Tubingen, Translate Haizi’s orginal

    after visiting Holderlin’s house at river Nectar

The Alcohol of the Sick

Please lift up the bed

My Holderlin, you are lying in this bed

Horse, running madly

Across the entire France

Becoming a pure poet, a symbol for the sick poets

My unlucky Horderlin

You are tied as a horse

In the carpenter’s house, to the deathbed

I do not know

Whether your second brother

Can ease your pain

With the remedy of tragedies, in the August evening

When those sisters and elders

Lift up the wool

The unlucky wool is burning

Like the white snow

He says --- no rush

Please wait until my song is over

I will drill into

Your dark and rusty horn

The luscious horn, the sounding horn

The crazy horn and the crown: I am lying down

--‘Ten thousand years is too long’

Only the horn is left, and the dark poems from the blind poets

Yearning for the Past, Or no more gains

When you hold the rusty sickle

In your hand

And cut off the snow and the sheep wool

Holderlin has gone insane

The son of the abbot

The lover of the banker’s wife

Holderlin has gone insane

When you build up the hospital

And set up the beds one after another

Holderlin will lie in the first bed

Live through days with no more gains

Those are the happy days

---“Gaining makes suffering”

I am missing the wild goose ----

The basket of laughers and tears

Follows me

And comes to life

I am missing the wild goose ----

And the bride with red skin dyed from the bloody evening

After the Blood is the Darkness

Holderlin---tell me what darkness is

How it buries you, embraces you

And drowns you

Like a river drowning a big horse

The living one, the screaming one, and the dictator of the darkness

You --- how can you fly over the abyss ---dance melancholy ---and abandon me

Laugh at me ---Holderlin

You have become part of the darkness, gigantic

My homeland

We are still building our homeland and village in the relics 

They will be buried by the darkness sooner or later

Tell me, Holderlin---who do I write these poems for

Hide the poisonous poems and food in the deepest cave

The orchard and the houses ---these relics ---what will they appear

        in the darkness, Holderlin

Will they glow as what we are told

Six years of journey in the gloomy rain

Can the brothers understand? Or, they have already died, without shedding any

sympathy?

Which god will guide you by hand over the road of light and dark shadows

Are you meeting your aging mother at the departure dock

Are they illusions or truths?

Beauty or lie? Misery or ecstasy?

Or they are united: dictatorship

After blood is darkness ---darkness is more terrifying than blood 

I will forever remember you

My unlucky brother Holderlin

To the Goddess of Destiny

Holding the broken lamp left by the old lover

Holding the fragile flowers picked from the high cliff

Jump, all the way down

The red wild goose

Is watching my beautiful village

From the other side of river

Dedicate my poems to the Goddess of the destiny

The misery is hiding in the mountain

It says whichever is whatever

The red wild goose

Trembles

When the wind is blowing to the south

We will eat the sheep

The sheep will be grazed on the green prairie 

The cloud will drift you away

Gone with the wind

---The Goddess of the destiny

Watching Humsun

       April 1997, San Francisco

                              

When a four-dimensional existence

Is metamorphosed into a             

    two-dimensional plane                                             

Feelings grow like mad germs

    and devour everything in the darkness    

                                                                      

You search the meaning in vain

As if the words possess all the power you once owned       

It does not matter

Whether you are grandiose or notorious             

                                                                      

History stomps through the shambles

Passions make no more difference      

                                                                      

Only the anemic ones are left                                         

They weep

and

sigh

in

the whimsical

shadow

and light

*Humsum: Norwegian Nobel Laureate of literature in the first half of the century