my liver’s doing. O.K. I guess
tonite, I quit smoking last
week. I wonder if they’ll blow
up an H Bomb? Probably not.
Manhattan Midnight, September 5, 1984
It’s All So Brief
I’ve got to give up
Books, checks, letters
File cabinets, apartment
pillows, bodies and skin
even the ache in my teeth.
September 14, 1984
I Love Old Whitman So
Youthful, caressing, boisterous, tender
Middle aged thoughtful, ten thousand noticings of shore ship or street,
workbench, forest, household or office, opera—
that conning his paper book again to read aloud to those few Chinese boys & girls
who know enough American tongue to ear his hand—
loath to select one leaf from another, loath to reject a sympathetic page
—the tavern boy’s look, a stone prisoner’s mustache-sweat, prostitute in the sun, garrulous old man waving goodbye on the stoop—
I skim Leaves beginning to end, this year in the Middle Kingdom
marvel his swimmers huffing naked on the wave
and touched by his desperado farewell, “Who touches this book touches a man”
tip the hat on my skull
to the old soldier, old sailor, old writer, old homosexual, old Christ poet journeyman,
inspired in middle age to chaunt Eternity in Manhattan,
and see the speckled snake & swelling orb earth vanish
after green seasons Civil War and years of snow
white hair.
Baoding, China, November 20, 1984
Written in My Dream by W. C. Williams
“As Is
you’re bearing
a common
Truth
Commonly known
as desire
No need
to dress
it up
as beauty
No need
to distort
what’s not
standard
to be
understandable.
Pick your
nose
eyes ears
tongue
sex and
brain
to show
the populace
Take your
chances
on
your accuracy
Listen to
yourself
talk to
yourself
and others
will also
gladly
relieved
of the burden—
their own
thought
and grief.
What began
as desire
will end
wiser.”
Baoding, November 23, 1984
One Morning I Took a Walk in China
Students danced with wooden silvered swords, twirling on hard packed muddy earth
as I walked out Hebei University’s concrete North Gate,
across the road a blue capped man sold fried sweet dough-sticks, brown as new boiled doughnuts
in the gray light of sky, past poplar tree trunks, white washed cylinders topped
with red band the height of a boy—Children with school satchels sang & walked past me
Donkeys in the road, one big one dwarf pulling ahead of his brother, hauled a cart of white stones
another donkey dragged a load of bricks, other baskets of dirt—
Under trees at the crossing, vendors set out carts and tables of cigarettes,
mandarin Tangerines, yellow round pears taste crunchy lemony strange,
apples yellow red-pinked, short bananas half black’d green,
few bunches of red grapes—and trays of peanuts, glazed thumbsized crab-apples 6 on a stick,
soft wrinkled yellow persimmons sat dozens spread on a cloth in wet mud by the curb—
cookpots on charcoal near cornerside tables, noodle broth vegetables sprinkled on top
A white headed barber shook out his ragged towel, mirror hung on red nail in the brick wall
where a student sat, black hair clipped at ears straight across the back of his neck
Soft-formed gritty coal pellets lay drying on the sidewalk and down the factory alley, more black mats spread,
Long green cabbages heaped by the buildingside waiting for home pot, or stacked on hand-tractor carts the market verandah a few yards away—
Leeks in a pile, bright orange carrots thick & rare, green unripe tomatoes, parsley, thin celery stalks awful cheap, potatoes & fish—
little & big heads chopped or alive in a tub, tiny fresh babies or aged carp in baskets—
a half pig on a slab, two trotters stick out, a white burlap shroud covered his body cleaved in half—
meat of the ox going thru a grinder, white fat red muscle & sinew together squeezed into human spaghetti—
Bicycles lined up along the concrete walk, trucks pull in & move out delivering cows dead and fresh green-stalked salad—
Downstreet, the dry-goods door—soap, pencils, notebooks, tea, fur coats lying on a counter—
Strawberry jam in rusty-iron topped jars, milk powder, dry cookies with sweetmeats
inside dissolve on the tongue to wash down fragrant black tea—
Ah, the machine shop gateway, brick walled latrine inside the truck yard —enter, squat on a brick & discharge your earth
or stand & pee in the big hole filled with pale brown squishy droppings an hour before—
Out, down the alleyway across the street a factory’s giant smokestack, black cloud-fumes boiling into sky
gray white with mist I couldn’t see that chimney a block away, coming home
past women on bicycles heading downtown their noses & mouths covered with white cotton masks.
Baoding, November 23, 1984, 9:30 P.M.
Reading Bai Juyi
I
I’m a traveler in a strange country
China and I’ve been to many cities
Now I’m back in Shanghai, days
under warm covers in a room with electric heat—
a rare commodity in this country—
hundreds of millions shiver in the north
students rise at dawn and run around the soccerfield
Workmen sing songs in the dark to keep themselves warm
while I sleep late, smoke too much cough,
turn over in bed on my right side
pull the heavy quilt over my nose and go back
to visit the dead my father, mother and immortal
friends in dreams. Supper’s served me,
I can go out and banquet, but prefer
this week to stay in my room, recovering
a cough. I don’t have to sell persimmons on the streetcurb
in Baoding like the lady with white bandanna’d head
Don’t have to push my boat oars around a rocky corner
in the Yangtze gorges, or pole my way downstream
from Yichang through yellow industrial scum, or carry water
buckets on a bamboo pole over my shoulder
to a cabbage field near Wuxi—I’m famous,
my poems have done some men good
and a few women ill, perhaps the good
outweighs the bad, I’ll never know.
Still I feel guilty I haven’t done more;
True I praised the dharma from nation to nation
But my own practice has been amateur, seedy
—even I dream how bad a student I am—
My teacher’s tried to help me, but I seem
to be lazy and have taken advantage of money
and clothes my work’s brought me, today
I’ll stay in bed again & read old Chinese poets—
I don’t believe in an afterworld of god or even
another life sep
arate from this incarnation
Still I worry I’ll be punished for my carelessness
after I’m dead—my poems scattered and my name
forgotten and my self reborn a foolish workman
freezing and breaking rocks on a roadside in Hebei.
Shanghai, December 5, 1984, 10 A.M.
II
“Ignorant and contentious” I spent lunch
arguing about boys making love with a student.
Still coughing, reclusive, I went back to bed
with a headache, despite afternoon sun
streaming through the French windows
weakly, to write down these thoughts.
Why’ve I wanted to appear heroic, why
strain to accomplish what no mortal could—
Heaven on earth, self perfection, household
security, & the accomplishment of changing the World.
A noble ambition, but that of a pathetic dreamer.
Tomorrow if I recover from bronchitis
I’ll put on a serious face and go down to the Market.
2:30 P.M.
III
Lying head on pillow aching
still reading poems of Tang roads
Something Bai said made me press my finger
to my eyes and weep—maybe his love
for an old poet friend, for I also
have gray on my cheek and bald head
and the Agricultural poet’s in the madhouse this week
a telegram told me, more historical
jackanapes maybe tragic maybe comic
I’ll know when I come home around the world.
Still with heavy heart and aching head I read on
till suddenly a cry from the garden reminded me
of a chicken, head chopped off running circles spurting blood
from its neck on farm yard dirt, I was eleven years old,
or the raptured scream of a rabbit—I put down my book
and listened carefully to the cry almost drowned
by the metal sound of cars and horns—It was a bird
repeating its ascending whistle, pipe notes burst
into a burble of joyful tones ending wildly
with variable trills in swift succession high and low
and high again. At least it wasn’t me, not my song,
a sound outside my mind, nothing to do with my aching brow.
3:30 P.M.
IV
I lay my cheek on the pillow to nap
and my thoughts floated against the stream
up to Zhong Xian west of the Three Gorges
where Bai Juyi was Governor.
“Two streams float together and meet further on
and mingle their water. Two birds fly upward
beneath the ninth month’s cold white cloud.
Two trees stand together bare branched
rooted in the same soil secretly touching.
Two apples hung from the same bough last
month and disappeared into the Market.”
So flowed my mind like the river, like the wind.
“Two thoughts have risen together in dream therefore
Two worlds will be one if I wake and write.”
So I lifted my head from my pillow and Woke
to find I was a sick guest in a vast poor kingdom
A famous visitor honored with a heated room,
medicines, special foods and learned visitors
inquiring when I’d be well enough to lecture my hosts
on the musics and poetics of the wealthy
Nation I had come from half way round the world
8:15 P.M.
V China Bronchitis
I sat up in bed and pondered what I’d learned
while I lay sick almost a month:
That monks who could convert Waste to Treasure
were no longer to be found among the millions
in the province of Hebei. That The Secret of the Golden Lotus
has been replaced by the Literature of the Scar, nor’s hardly
anybody heard of the Meditation Cushion of the Flesh
That smoking Chinese or American cigarettes makes me cough;
Old men had got white haired and bald before
my beard showed the signs of its fifty-eight snows.
That of Three Gorges on the Yangtze the last one downstream
is a hairpin turn between thousand-foot-high rock mountain gates.
I learned that the Great Leap Forward caused millions
of families to starve, that the Anti-Rightist Campaign
against bourgeois “Stinkers” sent revolutionary poets
to shovel shit in Xinjiang Province a decade before
the Cultural Revolution drove countless millions of readers
to cold huts and starvation in the countryside Northwest.
That sensitive poetry girls in Shanghai dream
of aged stars from Los Angeles movies. That down the alley
from the stone bridge at Suzhou were Jiang Ji spent
a sleepless night wakened by the bell of Cold Mountain Temple,
water lapping against his boat a thousand years ago,
a teahouse stands with two-stringed violin and flutes
and wooden stage. That the gold in the Sun setting
at West Lake Hangzhou is manufactured from black Soft Coal.
That roast red-skinned juicy entire dogs with eyes
bulging from their foreheads hang in the market at Canton
Qi-Gong’s approved by Marxist theoreticians. That men in
deep-blue suits might be kind enough to file a report
to your Unit on gossip they’ve heard about your secret loves.
That “Hang yu hang yu!” song is heard when workmen labor
yodeling on bamboo scaffolds over the street outside all night.
That most people have thought “We’re just little men,
what can we count” since the time of Qin Shi Huang.
VI
Tho the body’s heavy meat’s sustained
on our impalpable breath, materialists
argue that Means of Production cause History:
once in power, materialists argue what
the right material is, quarrel with each other,
jail each other and exile tens of millions
of people with 10,000 thoughts apiece.
They’re worse than Daoists who quibbled about immortality.
Their saving grace this year’s that all the peasants are fed.
VII Transformation of Bai’s “A Night in Xingyang”
I grew up in Paterson New Jersey and was
just a virginal kid when I left
forty years ago. Now I’m around the world,
but I did go back recently to visit my stepmother.
Then I was 16 years old, now I’m fifty eight—
All the fears I had in those days—I can still see myself
daydreaming reading N.Y. Times on the Chinese rug on the living room
floor on Graham avenue. My childhood houses are torn down,
none of my old family lives here any more,
mother under the ground in Long Island, father underground
near the border of Newark where he was born.
A highway cuts thru the Fair Street lot where I remember our earliest
apartment, & a little girl’s first kiss. New buildings rise on that street,
all the old stores along Broadway have disappeared.
Only the Great Falls and the Passaic river flow
noisy with mist then quietly along brick factory sides
as they did before.
10:15 P.M.
After Rewi Alley’s Bai Juyi, 200 Selected Poems (Beijing: New World Press, 1983), p. 303.
Black Shroud
Kunming Hotel, I vomited greasy chicken sandwiched
in moldy bread, o
n my knees before the white toilet
retching, a wave of nausea, bowels and bladder loose
black on the bathroom floor like my mother groaning
in Paterson 1937. I went back to bed
on the twelfth floor, city lights twinkling north,
Orion in his belt bright in the sky, I slept again.
She had come into the bathroom her face hidden
in her breast, hair overhanging her figure bent in front
of me, stiff in hypertension, rigor mortis
convulsed her living body while she screamed
at the doctor and apartment house we inhabited.
Some electric current flowing up her spine tortured her,
foot to scalp unbearable, some professional advice
required quick action, I took her wrists, and held her
bound to the sink, beheading her silently with swift
dispatch, one gesture, a stroke of the knife-like ax
that cut thru her neck like soft thick gum, dead quick.
What had I done, and why? Certainly her visage
showed the reason, strain and fright lasting thru death.
But couldn’t leave her body hidden in the toilet, someone
finding her bent over might wait, then push, then
horrified find her headless, skull fallen to the floor.
I picked her up by the shoulders, afraid to look at
the Medusa head
which I lifted by long hair & set
on the sink before the mirror, but beheld no mad
drawn-cheek wild-eyed or blood-splotched wrinkled forehead—
Calm, beautiful face, tranquil in life’s last moments
as if in prayer, eyes clear and modest, face content
with neither smile or frown but even-browed, eyebrows
in repose, cheeks colored healthy still as when alive.
“I made a mistake” I thought, in following the doctors’ rules,
or where’d I get th’ idea she was screaming and banging
her head on the wall in neural agony? Was that just my thought
or hadn’t others told me so? Why’d I do it so abrupt
without consulting the World or the rest of the family—
Her look at last so tranquil and true made me wonder
why I’d covered her so early with black shroud.
Had I been insane myself and hasty? I left the room.