cide?”
* * *
A voice from beyond my peripheral vision says, “You’re nothing
but a pseudo-Kantian neoliberal mirage with meta-narcissistic
tendencies.”
* * *
“No, I’m not.”
* * *
“Yes, you are.”
* * *
“No. I’m not.”
* * *
“Yes. You are.’”
VIII
In the district of Hóu-tcheou-fou, the magistrate’s assistant
Chen was taking a nap in his cabinet of pain. Suddenly, a mo-
torized airport staircase appeared, and beckoned him to follow.
It led Chen down a path hidden by rustling thickets of bamboo
to a clearing where, on a high pedestal, an enormous mirror
waited in the moonlight.
* * *
“Regard what you once were in your previous life,” said the stair-
case. Looking into the mirror, Chen saw a donkey muzzled with
wire. The beast gazed sadly back at him from its muddy pen.
Hummingbirds the color of spilled oil flitted across the frame.
* * *
“Now see what you were in the life before that one.”
* * *
Rubbing his eyes, Chen looked again. This time, he saw a girl
wringing a bloody rag out of an upper-story window. Her lips
appeared to be moving, but Chen couldn’t make out the words
to the song.
* * *
“Again,” said the vehicle.
* * *
Chen peered into the mirror once more. Where the girl had
been, he now saw a high official in old Ming costume—black
cap, red dragonfly robe, belt with jade buckle—bent over a faded
map of some unfamiliar region.
* * *
Just then a disheveled servant rushed into the clearing, pros-
trated himself before Chen, and exclaimed, “Don’t you recog-
nize me? I was your valet in Tá-t’oung-fou, but of course that
was over two hundred years ago.” Rising to his feet, he handed
Chen a scroll.
* * *
“What’s this?” Chen asked dreamily.
* * *
“See for yourself,” the servant replied. “It will clear your name.”
* * *
[DRAFT ONLY; PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE—trans.]
* * *
[CE N’EST QU’UN PROJET; NE CIRCULENT PAS, SVP—
trans.]
* * *
[JǏN GÒNG FÉIFǍ SHǏYÒNG; QǏNG BÙYÀO XÚNHUÁN—
trans.]
IX
Our sitter called in sick yesterday, so I stayed home with Mira,
watching a tree squirrel tuck twigs and trash into her wreck of
a nest outside the kitchen window instead of prepping for class.
* * *
“I love eyebrows,” my daughter announced in an access of uni-
versal grammar. “I love napkins. I love upstairs.”
* * *
On the radio, a woman with a faded Northern Irish accent de-
scribed efforts to restore various archaeological sites in and
around the provincial capital of Al Hillah, where the ancient
Mesopotamian city of Babylon once stood.
* * *
Speaking through an interpreter, a government official re-
counted how the 2,600-year-old paving stones of the ancient
city’s Processional Way had been crushed under the treads of
M1 Abrams tanks. A heliport had been constructed amid the
ruins. Wreathed in concertina wire, the remains of a ziggurat
which some scholars believe may be the original site of the
Tower of Babel, however, appeared to be largely intact for the
time being.
* * *
“I love flowers. I love fire,” Mira continued, upending her fruit
cup. “I love foreheads, too.”
* * *
At some point in the day, Song left me a message, but I couldn’t
make anything of it. Later that evening, I inspected the bath-
room mirror to see if I could discern any trace or infractions
from a previous life. All I saw was the chipped and tarnished
face of the mirror itself. I looked again. This time, to my relief,
a man dressed as a scholar from the recent past—vintage cardi-
gan, thinning hair, an untenured affect of worry beyond repair
—squinted out from the far side of the glass.
* * *
“I love forks,” he recited, floating toward me like an antediluvian
grouper in a Chinese restaurant fish tank. “I love flags. I love
ziggurats, too.”
XIV
Please print clearly and remember your name.
* * *
1) The river of fire, in ancient Greek thanatopography, feeds into
the river of ________.
* * *
2) From the river of pain spring two rivers—the river of
________ and the river of ________.
* * *
3) The river of ________ runs a separate course entirely, con-
cealed inside the Greek word for truth.
* * *
4) At the sight of sinners approaching, the ________ seethes
“like butter in a frying pan.”
* * *
5) ________ is the Sanskrit river of ash.
* * *
6) As the sun god Ra floats down the river of the hidden
chamber, his head is exchanged for that of a ________.
* * *
7) Those for whom much lamentation is made find the
________ swollen with tears and difficult to cross.
* * *
8) To our knowledge, the river of ________ has no name.
XVI
A student visited my office the day before yesterday with some
questions concerning her midterm exam. Apparently I’d been
a little dismissive of her worldview in my comments. As the con-
versation wore on, I found myself explaining that it would have
been physically impossible for Dante to crawl through the
center of Earth because, as everybody knows, the planet’s core
is very hot.
* * *
“But he went all the way through and saw the stars again,” the
girl insisted. “Are you calling him a liar?”
* * *
She had been homeschooled in a rural area downstate, and oc-
casionally required some additional learning support on my
part. Once more, I tried to explain that nobody could pass
through the world and come out the other side. It would be meta-
physically implausible. Studying a loose tile on the ceiling, my
visitor, whose name regrettably escapes me, seemed uncon-
vinced.
* * *
“When I get to heaven,” she rose suddenly to go, her face flushed,
“I will ask Dante.”
* * *
Classes were letting out for the day. The antiquated streetlamps
had begun to flicker on, one by one, across the main quad. Con-
sulting my watch, I worried that I might be late for my appoint-
ment.
* * *
“And what if he ended up in the other place?” I inquired, show-
ing the girl out the door.
* * *
“Then you ask him.”
Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi
Translated from the Chinese written by Yi
Lei
My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree
One of shortest poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree creates — in just five lines! — a lasting theological perspective: “When life ends, / Memory endures. / When memory ends, / What persists /Attests to the spirit.” Such a larger-than-life — and yet also such a delicate — approach distinguishes this collection as it gathers poems of eros and grief, each page bursting with attentiveness to our world. “Each blade of grass is a glorious eye,” Yi Lei writes, echoing, and also revising, Whitman. In very beautiful versions by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi, Yi Lei’s voice here becomes invigorating, lasting poetry in English.
Furtive
A black squall blankets the earth.
The stubborn are drenched, worn down.
Even dreams are slick and choked with moss.
* * *
Is meeting out of habit any worse
Than coming clean? I can’t let go
Of this clipping lifted from your wife’s garden.
* * *
Time and again, my voice storms up in a rage,
Weeps back down in tatters.
Such secrecy unravels me. Still,
My heart harbors a furtive joy.
(Why must I whisper?)
* * *
I’ve been careless with your letters, which lie scattered,
Lost. My name for you creeps off
Like a plant that has overgrown its pot.
* * *
* * *
June 15, 1986
Red Wall
Hot. Having burned me but also
Warmed me. I regard it from a distance.
The flowers choking it, bleeding onto it,
Red legacy binding our generations.
From below, we thousands cast upon it a
beatific, benighted, complacent, complicit,
decorous, disconsolate, distracted, expectant,
execrative, filthy, grievous, guileless,
hallowed, hotheaded, hungry, incredulous,
indifferent, inscrutable, insubordinate, joyful,
loath, mild, peace-loving, profane, proud,
rageful, rancorous, rapt, skeptical, terrified,
tranquil, unperturbed, unrepentant,
warring eye.
* * *
* * *
October 31, 1987
As Clear and Thus as Virtuous as Glass
I am as clear and thus as virtuous as glass.
To see through me, you need only glance.
Smash me to shards with the rap of a fist.
But to reach me, to really enter in,
You must travel an unfathomable distance.
* * *
* * *
December 5, 1987
In the Distance
Out past the horizon
And delimited by an
Unsentimental fog—
* * *
Past the farthest green grasses,
The flowers fading and blossoming,
Falls the torrent, the monsoon
In which a woman exalts, day and night,
Her face danced upon
By rainwater—
* * *
Out past distant heaven
And remotest earth
And the outer banks of the heart—
* * *
Past the curve of the horizon,
Neither hazy nor clear,
Where every night is a new celebration
To which your wise self and its foolish twin,
In a seamless incarnation,
Accompany you—
* * *
* * *
April 28, 1992
Heavy Rain
A woman showers in the rain—
A woman in the desert—
Fresh steam rising from her ribs.
* * *
She thinks, yes,
The beasts of the earth work in contentment.
Every tree, male or female, is delicate,
Watching at a lover’s window in heavy rain.
Or else they are disconsolate giants,
Their debate having ages ago been settled.
* * *
Let the dark man leave.
Let the queen wait alone in her carriage of rain.
The eternal
Arrives when the rain
Arrives.
* * *
* * *
December 23, 1991
SHORTLIST
Joseph Dandurand
The East Side of It All
Joseph Dandurand is a poet-storyteller. Portraying Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside’s prostitutes, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and abused, his autobiographical poems could easily drown in the brutality and tragedy they capture — but instead they heal. These are deeply moving spiritual invocations, extricated from poisoned air by a fallen angel. Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation, located on the Fraser River, near Vancouver. His origin and roots are the sources of wisdom and myths, which he masterly embeds in a drama of a dysfunctional modern society. His crystalline clear and remarkably multilayered poems are written in an unforgettable voice of someone who is telling a story in order to survive and to go on. A story of a man who has become a sasquatch, through writing.
The Shame of Man
He is buried somewhere
in a prison of fools. He gets
his meals and a good night’s
sleep but he will be gone forever
and most of us do not care
one way or the other
but for our people—
we are the ones who paid
the price as our mothers and sisters
disappeared on his pig farm
a few miles upriver from
where he had taken them.
Now they are just a memory
but we never forget—
as we never forget.
* * *
On any given night
they say he would hunt
like all predators downtown
and he’d have his pick
of the already lost and forgotten.
He would pick his target
and bring her back to the farm
where he would keep her
for a few days, feeding her drugs.
* * *
Once the desire was
too overwhelming
he would attack
and explode
with his inner demons.
He would choose life
or death
and in our case
it was
always death.
* * *
With the plunge of the knife
or the cold grasp of his filthy hands
he would end them and
bury them in the back.
* * *
As the new day began,
the pigs of the world would feast.
* * *
If I could change time
I would wait for the stinking pickup
and that little man in his big boots to appear.
I would follow him and as he picked up my sister,
I would follow him and when he got home upriver,
I would hop the fence and I would get to him
before he could do her any harm and I would
plunge a cold blade into his eye
or I would wrap my hands around his neck
and watch him slip away
and then I would bury him in the back.
* * *
My sister and I would return to the city
to await the next predator
and we would do the same.
* * *
But that never happened
and we still search and search for our sisters
as they disappear
and all I can do is stare at my hands
as they strangle an imaginary evil
who still to this day has a nice bed,
a good meal, a lifetime of knowing
he was more than a pig farmer.
Street Healer 1
He goes out at night and walks
slowly. They say he fell from
the sky several decades ago
but now he is a fully grown