张枣

（1962—2010），湖南长沙人，先后就读于湖南师范大学、四川外语学院。1986年赴德留学，后长期寓居西方，获德国特里尔大学文哲博士，曾任教于德国图宾根大学，为欧盟文学艺术基金会评委和“当代中国学”通讯教授。21世纪初回国，曾在河南大学、中央民族大学任教，2010年因肺癌去世。出版有诗集《春秋来信》，《中国文化现代性研究》（德文），主编有《德汉双语词典》，《黄珂》等书。另有英语、德语诗歌和童话译作若干。出版译作有《史蒂文斯诗文集》（与陈东飚合译）、童话绘本《月之花》、《暗夜》等。

1．LYRIC POEMS :

ZHANG ZAO (1962-2010)

In the Mirror

only if she recalls every regret in her life
will plum blossom fall and fall
say, seeing her swim to the riverbank
say, climbing up a pinewood ladder
dangerous things are lovely, no doubt
but no match for seeing her mounted homecoming blushing in shame.

bowing her head, answering the king
a mirror waits for her forever
it allows her to sit at the place she always sits in the mirror

gazing out of the window: only if she recalls every regret in her life will plum blossom fall and fall across Southern Mountain.

[BH, LMK]

Gently Swinging

Attic, language lab.

Autumn arrives with a bang, bright and clear, changed for the new glass of the universe on four walls,

everybody wearing headphones properly, expressions uniform as jade.

The pregnant teacher is listening too. Blurred sound’s
feathery fragments of the classics:

Evening News, Evening News, the tape fast-forwards, whistling noisily round the world.

Nervous words unwilling to pass away, like streetscape and
fountains, like extraterrestrials standing on some brink,
fiddling with the sunset glow, abruptly they unload a bolt of brocade: emptiness less than a flower!

She takes a look at the new pattern
around her, a loom in everyone’s mouth, muttering the exact same
good story.
Everyone is immersed in listening intently, everyone baring vital organs, working –

total awareness. [BH]

Early Spring February

the sun used to shine on me; in Chongqing one drop of dew’s early mood enveloping images one by one
I bypass stretch after stretch of air; the railway hurts
trains till they flee the light, cuckoo’s light song left behind I say, hello peaks, and parasol trees, pine and cypress too height regardless, please let me love as if in secret

in Hunan, sun shining in the eyes of my childhood
my hands grew up, the gently fondled road was shortened dust around the city whirls and dances round and round horn like a brother, car wheels a kaleidoscope
teething pain changes into the scars on my backside
fruit presses me to the tree, mercilessly knocks me
down. Oh, I still can feel that I am alive today
alive in a phony place made out of paper; spring
clucks and coos, sun prods all over like a quack doctor prods at these up-front or could it be these deferred times, prods and prods at the utopia of this world
oh, shun the hidden sage, useless as a rotten rope

[BH]

Choir

a choir warm on latitudes and longitudes tongues of young girls fresh from the bath like magician’s roses conjured out of thin air

who are they presented to? who are they a gift for? head, leaven the bread of my soul
little poplars, open the roaring heat inside me 37

raise it up, over-arching you, like straddling a definition; oh, the numinous difficulty
of those handy disposable notes

the girls are leading me to eat ashes
at the end of the universe, ah, the pasture of the void Wednesday passes on the baton

but some wolfish thing with the heart and lungs of a dog is howling, reverberating
relentlessly mouthing fallen May

1992 [BH, WNH]

37. ‘Little poplars, little pines, grow big and be the rafters of the motherland’ – a Communist Party song for pre-school children; roaring heat, lit. internal heat, is a term of art in traditional Chinese medicine.

Motherland Miscellany

what’s overflowing and running down, it’s not booze
that’s not yet a cherry pit, spat out with no more flesh on it than a corpse the boy at the bottom of the well, people still salvaging stuff

till the middle of the night, till suffocation, only then an empty bottle fallen to earth from the cloud’s mouth, unbroken will humans still tolerate me passing through the lobby

passing through the sexy silence of typewriters what’s been spilled is still not

the moon’s face installed on the water and beaten

black and blue; captain, oh your wicked women

haven’t opened the window of the water yet. But I’ve begun to lick I’m licking the bright clothes in the air

I’m licking the little brocade streamers pressed between the feet of the pages; till licking is swapped for being licked

I’d rather be licked all life long, never wanting to live a life

[BH]

The Condemned and His Path

From the capital to the weedy barrens,

broad sea, blank sky boundless, and my head locked in a pillory, my voice

hog-tied, bellflowers on a thousand field-paths disclose death –

a meaning crowned for the walker

on a long road and a far journey;38

I walk and walk;

death is inevitable: this is certainly

not politics. Thirsty, I

sketch a tiny forest spirit;

her bouncing breasts, a fresh and tender unfamiliarity, running across the never-named current,

while the razor-like fawn

restrains the clear brittle shade;

if I couldn’t sleep,

I would aesthetically assume

I was making sleep sleep,

deeply and soundly;

if I feared, if I feared,

I would presumably think

I was already dead, I’d

made death die, and also had

 taken away everything I’d been seeing:


the proletarian flavour of the discolouring scenery,

restaurants, ferries, kingfishers,


a few lands of abundance in the provinces,


a few slovenly hookers shuffling mahjong tiles,


a few fierce tigers banished from humans by humans,

thrown aside like worn-out socks,


and the distant shadows of pagodas,

even further away, there’s that tiny forest fairy,


elegant, floating and lingering, a little mother you can call by

her baby name,

her world flowing with fragrance

same as everybody else,


the dream of someone going to their death,

the dream of the meta-human,


it’s impure, like pure poetry.

1994 [BH, LMK, WNH]

38. This is a quotation from Qu Yuan’s ‘Li Sao’. See ‘On Encountering Trouble’, tr. Hawkes, Songs of the South, p.73, lines 191-92, among other similar lines.

Chef

The future is a chill blast from inside a body plundered


and passed, the overturned vinegar bottle permeates tendon and bone.

The chef pushes the door open, sees twilight, like a little girl,


using the tip of its tongue to feel all around for the light switch. Inside there’s peacock-like specificity,


on the ceiling a few balloons, still living a kind of life:


the chef endures the suddenness. He cuts the tofu in two,


slices it an inch thick, puts it into the applauding pan of oil,


fries both sides golden-yellow;

then changes to another pan,

stir-fries a bit of smashed ginger, mince, and bright red bean-paste,

imports the tofu; adds a little millet-wine, MSG and water,

lets it soak in to become a soft secrecy,


at this point, sprinkle on some diced spring onion and it’s ready to serve!

The chef invents this reality because of some dream,
heavy snow whirling outside, looking for a name.


From the depth of his aching tooth, the sky is slowly


drawing away that little floral dress.


From myopia lenses, the past leaks out like sperm.

Superlatively the chef sticks

his head out of the window, the recipe cools down into a bridge


toward the altogether unacknowledged fields. He listens, listens:

truly, someone is making this dish, and putting


this mouthwatering bait into the dark night backyard.


Two ‘Nos’ are on the run in the fiction of the times,


like two little tongue beasts, emitting hot air,


grappling with each other on the ice-bound river surface...

1995 [BH, LMK]

Edge

Like the tomato hiding on the edge of a steelyard, he’s always
lying down. Whatever flashes over, a warning or a swallow, he
is rock steady, on guard beside the little thing. The second hand moves to ten o’clock sharp, and the alarm clock quietly leaves, a cigarette
has also left, carrying pairs of blue handcuffs
his eyes, clouds, German locks. Anyhow, what’s not here
has all gone.

Emptiness, getting bigger. He is distant, but there’s always
some edge; on the edge of the cog, the edge of the water, edge of himself. Every so often he looks at the sky, forefinger up, practising fine, thin, but frantic calligraphy: ‘Come back!’
It’s true, those who lost their shape have reverted to that original shape: New Zone windows are full of wind, the moon dipped in a lager barrel, the steelyard, abruptly tilting, there, infinite
as a pacified lion
flat out beside the tomato.

[BH, LMK, WNH]

In the Forest

1

A few default matters of yours,
like thunderclouds, they call you to the hilltop.
Gliders of falling leaves,
a few small distant parachuting question marks wriggle and gently fall into the bottleneck of scenery. It seems somebody in the weather is performing a mathematical calculation.
You burn with anxiety.
Rings of the bell, rings of the bell throw headless golden armour
into the depths of the forest. There, mist
is operating in the corner of the Autumn wind, starting up
a discarded picture,
a warm generator room shaped like the insides of an alarm clock.
There, you walk about.

2

You walk about, as if the forest isn’t in the forest.
Like an urgent long-distance call, squirrels split open the forest paths. Listen: Something’s wrong.
The sky is filled up with floating malfunctions,
a plaza has been reversed.

You replace the handset, maple leaves all over you.

Mushrooms, they twist the bronze screws even tighter –
making a china shop inlay itself in the fresh green of Freiheitstrasse, making the shadows that are detectives for death
tag along in.
They shoot a glance at the zeros on the invoice;
their bodies segment and hop one-legged through the revolving door. They turn right, and point vaguely at
the forest on the other shore.

A misty butterfly effect.
At noon, flowing water plays the flute.
The bright and clean expression of porcelain, a ballet of many delicate poses. They say: smash it. We say nothing.

3

You’re on the rampage.
That receipt is clasped right in your hand,
you want to redeem your pawned shadow.
The forest turns dark, raindrops strike the keyboard of dense leaves, and you’re lost. Yet
hope is always on the left. Leftward,
there, the abstract man mute and silent on the road sign,
he gives you a little nod;
green, staying on and waiting in the tree trunk like a mother, flimsily tweaking the precise cogs.
Woodpeckers, working while they’re talking,
circles and circles of sound waves rippling in time and tide.

Woodpeckers, permeating the whole forest, and Monday.

4

A circle of open ground.
There, the long distance runner is repairing his breath machine.
His thirst opens up a treeful of red apples,
their scent lifts and floats into the Golden Bell Tower, returning reality

or letting it slip away.
He feels deeply alone because of his thirst. He bends his head to polish his warm palm: it seems to be a train station,
a hubbub of voices. A bunch of kids off to a picnic splash skeins of crazily dappled spouting water.
Light, it sends a pointsman-like shadow to stand at the crossroads.
He feels he’s got from the universe, for the first time, a pair of hands, and violence.

1 January 1996, Tübingen [BH]

Hair Salon: Restricted Access or Long Shot

1

Small town in the south. Sultry as Utopia.
Electric fans blowing everybody’s bones all fluttery, but no one can fall apart. On a little stone bridge, two or three tourists point at the landscape, one
a northern taxman on the run from his criminal past.

2

I’m someone with plenty of aliases too,
I’m stifling a fit of laughter, my chopsticks reach for the Drunken Prawns. The emptiness of the empty air is so churned up it’s utterly broken.

The boss’s sixty-fourth mask has opened its mouth, and what it says is the usual enigma: ‘Cleanliness, I’m its slave – because it’s in plain view,
because it knows no limits –

you have to constantly clear up behind it’.

A woman interrupts: ‘Our boss
is a good man. One time I was looking out from upstairs
and I saw he was kneeling in the middle of the road, drunk, rolling up his sleeves to fold the zebra crossing and take it home’.

3

I go to sleep on a rush mat but wake up beside the rockery. Butterflies usher in the future, but duplicate some Ming dynasty morning. On a day like this, you only need to feel out of sorts from head to foot to know the future is on its way;

you only need to feel alone, and then you know
everything’s gone completely wrong, and there’s no way to change it.
At a moment of dead calm, only when the wind suddenly blows upstream, does it stand you up, and like someone in a rage, you leap forward,
tear the paper, as your true name –
an ambulance singing like cicadas – hurtles toward you.

[BH, WNH]

A Key for C.R.

Million-ton darkness. We’re going home, clothes swollen with the west wind. A glass of water is isolated on the bookcase.

Hidden in the great vastness, swallows aim their migration at a single tiny cent a thousand miles away,

while we’re locked into the memory of the mountain shadow outside the room. Your nakedness fills the verandah,
and all around us, the black magnet’s night like a meditator attracts

emptiness. A key is sucking in the world.
An airmail letter delivered in error passes back and forth between you and me. ‘Big’, it whispers, ‘big’.

The flames leap up: ah, the letter, endlessly growing,
it presses us to live inside.
You’re drunk and you throw up, I’m thinking long and hard about writing

a reply,
and my shadow is holding two sheets of paper, as if

1996 [BH]

Song Sung Drunk

I’m stretching my indebted and lopsided wings.

Last night, as the party lurched and wobbled and drifted leftward, the booze was so sweet it began to bow down low. Live prawns of notes spurt-strolled from the cello, and then, pitter-patter,
stood to attention in Booze Wonderland, asking if anyone was starting a

revolution.
There was a fat guy weeping and taking a string of firecrackers from his

inside pocket,
but nobody was paying any attention. Hey! Don’t close in so far away, the seven or eight of you, don’t swing your hair back and forward, don’t let the teapot’s liberated zone shatter and flood out.
Don’t bow down low to me (under the table the deer goes ‘doh!’)

There was a Party official type on tiptoe, raising a glass, with
pocket-money snout, telling foreign guests to ‘Eat cock!’ 39
The booze laughed before it happened. I kept on drifting leftward, so was
I the fat guy? No way could the string of bangers catch fire.
My mind was a thousand miles away, declaiming in an empty phone box. Could a hit man have come as contracted? The world
showed its blue tail, with only a sodden towel
passed over here, an empty boat turning back through the cold waves.
Oh, falling down left and right, let us from the body of it
refine another Manchuria, a motorway
leading to variations on svelte and slender, leading to the seven or eight of you. Your name was Emerald, but you disappeared for a while, or maybe
as you dialled your mobile you were feeding the stone lions
to call the empty phone box a thousand miles away.
(Her boyfriend promised to wait there for her call,
but he didn’t come, so she was imagining her own illusory ‘there’.)
She came back here, collapsed all over us, as if
it was all hyacinths at the other end. An old chancer swayed over
to toast somebody. Character was dripping from everyone’s
finger-ends, the fat guy’s firecrackers stayed unlit, so
someone chucked his lighter away. ‘My mind’,
the fat guy spat, ‘is very very clear – no – Our’
the fat guy slapped himself, ‘Our Imperial Mind knows what’s what’.
The hit man grew softer. Outside, ice sealed in the news.
‘Left, left,’ the fat guy helped the hit man into the toilet.
The hit man kissed his absence like he was kissing the chin of the King of China Oh, King of China! Absent, like the hit man. But me, like the
fat guy, again and again I bowed down low before The Will of Heaven; or maybe I was that drunk, a thousand miles away, by chance beside the phone box, hearing it ring, ambling over, but falling behind the silence.
The drunk waited by the empty phone box, singing, oh singing, oh:
‘Oh far away, oh, far away, you’ve got an abstract of this place’.

[BH, WNH]

39. There is a pun here: the harmless ‘chi ji ba’ (Let’s eat chicken) is a homophone for the vulgar ‘chi jiba’ (suck dick).

Father

In 1962 he didn’t know what he could do. He
was still young, very idealistic, pretty leftish, but
carrying the name of a rightist. He’d escaped home to
Changsha from Xinjiang, puffy with hunger. His granny made him
a pot of tripe and turnip soup, with red dates floating in it.
Incense was burning in the room – a snare rising upward with its smell.

That day he really was at his wits’ end.
He wanted to go out for a stroll, but not very much.
He stared at things he couldn’t see, laughed out loud.
His granny gave him a cigarette and he smoked it, his first.
He said that in the dispersing rings of smoke were the words ‘Monstrous,

Absurd’.

At midday he thought he might go and sit a while on Tangerine Island, to practise the flute.

He walked and walked, then didn’t want to go there any more, but following the road back he suddenly felt:

there are always two selves,
one going forward in obedience,
one going forward in disobedience,
one sitting on a bolt of brocade, whistling a song,
and this other one walking on May Day Avenue, walking in an unperishable

truth.
He thought: it’s good now, everything’s just fine!

He stopped. He turned around. He walked towards Tangerine Island again. With that turn, he alerted an alarm clock at the edge of the sky.
With that turn, he messed up every rhythm on earth.
With that turn, the road was filled with miracles, and

he became my father.

[BH]

2.NARRATIVE POEMS

Death Sentence on the German Soldier Shermanski

Russian was my destiny. I grew up, this orphan on the border,

on the edge of bread and windmills.
And oh, the picture book villages!
Apart from mother tongue German, my Russian grew at lightning speed,
so fast it overtook secret trains my teeth my age and trees.
Kakaya choroshoya pogoda!
Hey, what lovely weather!

After that the war broke out. First I went to Greece, full of daytime and

stones; eucalyptus trees and the murmuring music of streams silenced me.
Three months, I didn’t say a word,
never even said Jawohl to the officers.

After that they transferred me to Russia: the Neva ablaze,
Stalingrad trashed –
this seemed to be all my fault.

Really – words are the world, and the world
doesn’t actually forgive in words.
Eh, years of hate, down-at-heel words, how long do I have to suffer you?

After that we were billeted in
some village, and though I’d never seen the place before,

it seemed like I’d been there many times. What, davay? ‘Funny that what we know best is strange
places, eh, Captain?’
And the Captain says, ‘Shermanski,

we’ve got to fix up a bunker,
like a dagger to the enemy’s heart!’
Because of my Russian,
I was sent to scrounge up some eggs, milk and other grub.
So every day I was in and out of the lanes, with their walls of wattle and

daub,
October sunshine tracing my shadow liquid as running water, me happy as Schubert’s Trout.
My quick tongue flipped open door curtains,
playing cuckoo to tease my crimson Katya

– All set, Katya?

Give me ten red apples today. Katya’s armpits are a bit rank, like mine
but it’s no problem; through the night
the moon plays warm across our bodies.
The first time, weren’t our bodies
like vocabulary, colliding, turning into idioms? Katya, Ya tebya lyublyu!

– Tell me, how do you say that in German? I answer, Ich liebe dich, Katya!

After that our bunker was blown away, guerillas, eh, lovely Katya?

The court martial convicted me of treason, gave me forty-eight hours.

I used twenty-four for an escape,
but they dragged me back; I used another fourteen to plead for mercy, writing Bitte, bitte, Gnade!
but it was rejected. Then they gave me another ten hours,

eight hours, six hours, five hours;
after that the chaplain came,
and he was so well-meaning it was like an eternity: eternity’s no substitute for me.
Just like a bullet’s no substitute for me,
me, Shermanski, what a guy!
The chaplain cried, held me, kissed me:

– My son, my son, Du bist nicht verloren!
There’s still time, do you want to write a letter?
You dictate and I’ll write/But do you speak Russian? God knows all languages, my son.

So I’m in a hurry to say, Katya, my darling darling Katya, I still have ten minutes, daybreak still has ten minutes,
autumn still has five minutes,

we still have two minutes, one minute, half a minute,

ten seconds, eight seconds, five seconds, two seconds: Lebewohl! Katya darling!

Hey, shoot me in a vital organ. Don’t shoot me in the heart.

Katya, my darling...
I have died a death – really, what is death? Death is just like how the others died.

[BH]

3. SEQUENCES

Conversations with Tsvetaeva

A Sequence of Sonnets

‘C’est un chinois, çe sera long’ Tsvetaeva

1

Black eyes disclose a smile for you, affectionate,
I try to peddle you an embroidered wallet,
kingfisher blue outside, with such exquisite phoenixes, and in gold thread the lucky ‘double happinesses’ – Two? Nyet, two francs fifty. See, how

the fifty difference makes a bad rhyme now;
like us both stepping off to walk on each pavement, and yet again you can’t understand my southern accent; waiting for the lights to turn into the green anchorite, you keep on left, and I, I go stumbling to the right.
It’s not me, but suddenly towards me, someone
hair flying, rushes towards you, raising a hand,

some kind of thing, not foliage, but like foliage,
has passed into the tender hush of your theatre loge.

2

Every day, I dream of Immemorial Tristesse.70 Drifting clouds of white, Marlene, and you’re brewing a pot of your private coffee,
lump sugar beyond the blue of near sight distantly guilty
like a houseboy. He longs for the big issues of wrong and right. Doing a job, like a craft, the result of poetry

is a series of still-lives, in human symmetry,
maybe even usable? But its restraint can’t surpass
the pair of brackets that shadow two lovers. The looking-glass can do poetry too, if anyone wants it, but he must, to be frank, guard against its habits of confuddling left side and right flank, the two fronts face to face, bickering over some angry pretext, while white and red duel over the word not. Someone, perplexed

sees themselves in the mirror, the revolution’s houseboy home from banishment;

finely ground, suddenly devoid of people, the coffee drops in astonishment.

3

...as usual, I bury my head in an empty tumbler;
you’re done for; as it looks for grave-clothes, the future
gets rid of the afternoon with fragments stretched tight. Russia’s done for – a negative from the era of black and white, a bass voice: Good morning, sir, you high-school mite:
ah – let’s go – oh, come in – so cry, then – all right?
The masked ball of titles, R, trembling after the pronoun’s said, motor-like revs secret treaties, birch forests and kisses of red. Paris is done for as well.

I’m sat here under an umbrell-
a, looking round and working. A new library is being constructed,

flower gardens and glass bookstands set into it.

People, they’re done for too, if-words everyone’s vade mecum, not like the butterfly, terrifying the veins of the blossom.

70. By Gui Zhuang (1613-73 AD), a lament for times gone by, written at the very beginning of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 AD). The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD) was the last native Chinese dynasty: the Manchu were related to the Mongols, and so foreigners. This was a large genre, the lament for the old ways.

4

Our eyelashes, how come they jump for joy in the alien corn? We’re nervy, routed, unable to invest in how it all looks.
The mother-tongue boat is cast away on a boundless bourn, going ashore, I’m on foot outside myself, the letterbox

opens like a Trojan horse, empty words swarm,
cover over the bleakest of frosts for the early morn; unfamiliarly, on the gas stove the snake kidney prances,
the waning moon in exile disperses the misery of your menses, mum, Cassandra, professional prophet of your folk,
they forced your silhouette to inhale foreign smoke,
but sunlight, its worst penalties are still unrolling, so:
the more precise the birds, the less serious the people, though

a sheet of paper crackles in the fire, vanishes in a gale,
the actual soul escaping life young – ash, it’s history’s tale.

5

Sunshine can occasionally be a wolf, too, strolling farther across the land, as shadow sucks the olive pits of remembering: those are gods, giving your mouth the aftertaste of the lather of sex, rendering you useless, the box of foretelling
powerless to take on a cargo of zombies,
bathing at this beach ruled by dazzled blindness.
To see means to speak it out, and say it really is the sea,
at this instant. Round. See epilepsy. See.

Life, where? ‘Hector, I see you sitting
in a million pairs of eyes, in a trance, sobbing’ –
you stand here, but your corpse has long since paled. Once again you go back outside, the hero invisible early, and all that will remain

will be an inhuman thug and a cola bottle, the flesh’s body-building, spare parts of lobster-like ferocity, magnifying what’s coming.

6

Cherry, bright red, as if you’re waiting for the homecoming of someone. some things, I want to go and get. Afternoon
I sat and sat, then went to sleep, my ears just dead done,
I agreed to go somewhere else to bring back a book in Russian.

You sat in your own dispersing hair, a skylark for your helmet.

Pen, it’s warm because it’s looked-for. Far off, visitors. In my dream your hand is dripping broken fingers,
I want to go and get them: people, train, trumpet;

Cherry, bright red, the pure logic of waiting,
palpitatingly I calculate the time I have left for doubt,
there’s no you, how the motherland’s windows are emptying. Breathe. I’ll go and get them, new words to lead you home like trout;

you go and get them, the little rascals in the door lock are spewing out static –

it hurts, but the startled choir is soaring on high, insulated and perfect.

7

You’re back in Moscow, your requests refused so rudely,
but life’s stumbles also equal poetry’s stumbles exactly.
On Old Year’s Night the crow’s children, in all their finery,
wait for the bells, but they have to disperse: the times are awry.
The telephone operator reclines in stretcher-bearing scenery,
the real arrives late again as the Writers’ Association number rings on

emptily:
this one dead, this one gone mad, complaining, complaining,
as the long-legged mosquito of complaint buzzes its air-raid warning. Perfect, oh, perfect, you always have to suffer
a short-term but golden-voiced line manager,
a sentence-reading (Pekinese) lapdog, sometimes saying this
has got too long, sometimes saying how naïve your thinking is,

as rooftop colleagues shout fire! after the fact, they haltingly race
over with congratulations, come to taste death’s door slamming in your

face.

8

The east turns white, a classical act coming to its conclusion: two lovers, one to the left and one to the right, part-human and

part-demon,
the tangerine of heart speaking to heart rips the fragrance of their prose, it’s love deep inside, a tranquil flesh-and-blood rose.

Craftsmanship is touch, however distant your separation;
the possibility of impossibility is the name of your habitation –
you softly speak of these things as I am yearning
to carry you on the dawn breeze to your home that is burning:
words, they’re not things, this being the point that must be made clear, and so it becomes necessary to live a life that has interest and allure, like this moment – magnolias exuberantly independent, confessing
the alarm is over, like the hair of lovers drifting and falling.

The east turns white, inside your name you vanish away, afforested flocks of birds sing in chorus: beware of the sky.

9

People can’t explain the things that are all around them, can they? Like how come the visible razor blade can snatch the soul away? What connects the two? Rope, cobblestone, knife,
self, every little thing, these can all demand a life,

the man-made world is an unmitigated enemy,
vacant flower-shadows angrily cheer the walls of the room, frightening you. It’s not other people, I always presume,
even less you yourself, who cross out your body,
but it’s those articles like coil springs, scuttling out there,
that shut down the lodgings of the eyes, forcing
you to shout: Outside, oh, outside, always elsewhere!
Even death is only joining up the parts of this aimless drifting.

Who’s fiddling with the up and down buttons of the rootless lift? Most of all I’m afraid that the self is the self’s one and only exit.

10

I take off my glasses, wishing to be an interpreter for the deaf and dumb – children of the universe, stony silence reigns in the auditorium;
the air is reciting this poem, and what it implies is the chance
of blossom being hustled by the butterflies of gesture’s dance.

The inside story on reality is that it’s another invention:
he’s not in this place, this moon’s homologation,
he’s not in the village pub, just like here and now there is no me – a glass anonymously sipped, and the scenery
‘s structure has suddenly changed. In fully loaded time and space, the drinker crosses the bridge, and he looks back stunned at his face marooned on the other bank, declaiming a torrent of verse. Some

pity for the world and its ways, and a plan for reform
let his steps be concocted out of all the world’s weightlessness.
Oh Your Honour, Sir, look, see, everywhere, the moon shadows ...

11

...yes, Your Honour, the moon is rising before us here,
brightness all around, sir, mountain peaks sticking to your whiskers: below us, streetlamps in the south of the city reveal the soapy atmosphere, as, eyes tight shut, at midnight a Living She showers,
her blinds twitter with hand-shadows, she shampoos like she’s at prayer, turns round, is hidden in the dark, then the fridge blinks open;
forever like a wildcat, that hunk from the ads whirls away then
beyond the comets; the ice-cream sky, wisecracks everywhere...
...oh nightingale, right now you’re in a different place,

yes, sir, see, the one who wasn’t playing piano is also strumming,

a homeless wanderer, always going back, always returning:
neither much nor little, just happening to echo Immemorial Tristesse – hey, Your Honour, tell me, how come cassia trees that are out of sight are folded into our thoughts, stimulating the sequence of the night?

12

Can it really be a goodbye, September?
Your gaze, it decorates and furnishes some new interior:
a bronze figurine is this way, a swivel chair that way, leaves falling, the girlfriend of this fresh, cool cosmos, fearless in all her doing: right? Right? Eyelashes in chorus closely question
the instant’s individual place, is it really right then?
The king, it falls beyond the chessboard; the west wind will blow the financial arena of the clouds under the window:
noon, an individual person, arriving at the fast-food booth, depicting the throughway for bread, fingers point to mouth;
Right? Poetry’s this way, is the vagrant accordion
that way? Harvest’s Katyushas lead me on
to the point I’m at right now: footsteps of the world, oh
halt! Right? How should we say ‘No!’?

[BH]