No, my poems
Do
Not
Read
Like
Ezra Pound.
A Notebook From 1967
Leather-bound messages,
traveled from hands to hands
and arrived here,
in an antiquity store;
a display of a turbulent past,
unclear now
on yellow pages, where
a downpour of thoughts had fallen
and a roar of raging words—
silenced,
after almost fifty years,
by a red price tag.
Zhang Yuan
It crouches
deep in the garden.
A bizarre phantasm in a still
aluminum jungle;
A wound where
memory
flows and stops
the air, thwarted
by the refracted light
of modernity.
A hundred years—
worms,
wars,
humans,
guns,
emperors
paupers
built
demolished
re-built
preserved now
in the name of a billion RMB
gentrification.
The same,
its terracotta redemption
when time confiscates the iron-trace
of humanity.
*Zhang Yuan, or the garden of Zhang, is a renowned residential house built early of the last century in West Nanjing Road, Shanghai, now an area for bars and cafes.but news comes this garden will soon be demolished for a new shopping mall.
First Ride Home
I was sixteen when the truck broke down
and parked despondently inside a mountain.
It was early winter.
I felt I was tossed into a vortex when the truck stopped with a screeching sound.
The headlamp was still on, like desperate eyes looking hard into a shroud
of darkness and confused.
No stars, absolutely no stars;
They had fallen into the gaping mouth of the mountain,
waiting to be fished out by the invisible hands of a late morning.
Terrifying silence came, seeping in through the windshield.
It forced into my lungs and grabbed my heart, the stench of the night air.
I gasped.
The driver was fidgety, trying to call someone,
No signal, he said and discarded the thought of rescue.
He was grumbling something unclear while he killed the engine.
His words lacerated the night.
I took the sleeping bag he gave me and crawled in, knowing
home was still far, far away…
Or in a good dream.
A Fateful Night
I drink tonight, to the city that weeps.
A toast it shall be,
from the lips of a man who loves truly
the vast lands of China.
— she deserves better;
But it doesn’t matter now, does it?
Salvation comes to those who need it not.
An old woman by the garbage dump—
A black dog with a severed tail—
Everyone is drifting into the endless night.
It comes early now.
