scruta

I saw China on the face of an old woman eating with her son:

She suddenly glared at me while chewing on sauteed spinach,

Her visage a wrinkled whorl of pointed disdain;

She gave her son a radiant smile as she looked away,

Her teeth comforting, bright as new-fallen snow.

I’ve decided to start translating Chinese poetry. I’m not trained in this, so I have no idea about the traditions/shades of meaning in these words. I’m planning to learn as I go. Criticism is warmly welcomed. For my first attempt, I’ve started with a poem that I’ve been told is easy – “one you learn when you’re 10 years old.” Let’s see how it goes…

回乡偶书

（贺知章）

少小离家老大回，

乡音无改鬓毛衰。

儿童相见不相识，

笑问客从何处来。

+++

“A Homecoming, Some Thoughts”

(He Zhizhang)

I was young when I left home

Old when I returned again.

The way I spoke didn’t change,

Not like this hair behind my ears.

Children saw me

But they didn’t know who I was.

Smiling, they asked me like a stranger,

Where are you from?

I saw an ancient shadow play

In Shanghai, China, far away.

I could not understand the songs

The warble, clatter low and long;

The locals too had lost the words,

And told me so with smiles absurd.

They asked me how I came to see

This spectacle in front of me.

But I was lost in puppetry –

The flattened models hard to see

That flashed behind the stretch of skin

And bayed like ghosts above the din.

The form was strange, from long ago

And gave me stories I couldn’t know.

My Chinese tender, knowledge weak

I made up stories so they’d speak.

+++

I saw a man behind the screen,

Just his face and his hand

Clutched about a bow

Dragging across an erhu.

He rocked with the music

Lost in the melody,

Pentatonic, ebbing about the puppets

Projected on the skin.

But he didn’t see the stories either.

He didn’t see the intrigues of principates.

He had his own stories.

I couldn’t imagine them,

But they sat there on his face

And didn’t need to speak.

The following two poems were composed collectively by Ferret and his friends during a rained-out beach holiday. With little to do and a penchant for poetry, Ferret and his compatriots each wrote 1 1/2 lines of verse on a piece of paper, folded the paper over to hide the first line and passed it along. These are the results:

No One was Harmed in the Making of this Poem

Our tale begins in the steamy depths of a Turkish bath,

In his opening gambit, he figured the math was in his hardened heart

And it moved him to tears to see in that room

An unborn boy, smoking, riddled with gloom

Throat gargle tea milk, wormed silk tissues fettered

With darting, shaved sparrows’ victory tune,

The teething assassins beat a retreat with

The bonny boy who took the alien spawn in hand

And sent it off to Neverland to choke several whores

A fantastic tale! Told by drunkards and bores

The bell summons ladies of the night

And the Jesus whores.

They left by the side door, upon a frond of

Memories shorn into a cake which the alien pulled

Into its heart pumping black blood, churning with the sound of

A thousand crying babes aching on the inside

Got trampled in an orgy, and half of them died.

Oh wale! Oh woe! The dead victims’ mothers cried.

“When shall we meet on the dwarf toss slide?”

Said the cowgirls. The plasma night pushed

Against the Amazon fence the green, bug-eyed

Extraterrestrial spat its venom, turning the surrounding crowds sick

Making the mothers run for the doors, their heavy legs

Unshaven, moist, almost goat-like pegs

An ode to my spindle legs, a crash of smut and

Belly pork dregs brings footfall celebratory smacks,

Lying, lying the shaker stood down.

***

From the Cuff

What will you recall, and what will you forget?

What in one’s mind is gone, you can’t regret.

Note the shallow fucks or bad stares, not the lost retreats

Or the moneyed snares.

Beat upon the classic drip leaf womb, thrown out amid the original nut crackers’ snap!

You do not think of Mr. Toad or his wild ride, your children’s stories

And how these teatime fantasies lied.

Chewed on wet young beef, belief of blonde whine

Filled women cried to be a bride,

Because they couldn’t hide the Cinderella songs

Those Snow White slippers through the gasps of wedding vows.

So the flag was raised glorious amid the roses of love and success.

A lemon better cheer fills the throats of old men

And the young women make lemonade with their seductive, saccharine

Sacrifices before the altars.

A flash of blinding purple cowers the horned headed

Frothing beasts, their purpose suddenly dreadful,

With their eyes full and puffing like steam organs

Removed of every stop.

Through the graves the deer were barking,

As the dappled light of dawn breezed through the mist

And the chapel bells were screaming off like earthquakes

Reverberating through the catacombs.

A group of drunk Germans slammed their fists onto

The crossword puzzles in outrage. And all of the letters

Of language became spurious, indicating only the scribbles

Of mangled monkeys high on dope.

Groped the band stand, blue skirted flirted and dirted

The headlights, so I said “Goodnight!”

You want to know why poets suffer? Why they perversely grasp the sword of Damocles and bring it down upon their heads?

The greatest poets strike at what is most universal, and there is nothing more universal than suffering.

There are times when I tire of words

When these connections are just cobwebs

Made from the dust and decay of spirits long dead

And I feel I’m just a fool who clumps them into heaps

Thinking I’ll weave them into clothes to hide

My naked flesh from the world.

+++

Sometimes I’m overly brazen,

And I weave and weave and weave…

But the clothes are quickly ripped and worn.

So I patch them and patch them and patch them…

Until I look like a ragamuffin begging for change.

+++

But that’s how it is.

Don’t be fooled by what lies behind appearances,

Inside poets are paupers, too.

I want to know why it is that glitter replaced ink,

And all the artworks of a great nation

Were wrapped up in a smirking irony

Embracing the gaudy demands of materialism

But grasping its ideals with wrenched palms.

+++

But then I remember

An embrace never opens up the world.

It silently covets a corner

And creates another hiding place within it.

In that moment there with our bodies bare

You can’t deny we’re anything but this:

+++

We are bodies struggling, flopping, turning

Heaving against this river called life,

wound with these moments together

In the whirls and rapids, the eddies and falls.

+++

We’ll lash these moments together

As our raft, our rock, our treebranch.

We’ll use them to keep afloat in the torrent.

I was walking down the street

With chocolate in one hand

And pride in the other.

I smacked my lips on both.

Feeling particularly animal,

I pointed my snout towards the sky.

The trees were waving at me

Singing couplets:

“Today’s the day your love has come along

So put your burdens down and hear our song.”

So I listened, and began humming with them.

+++

The people on the street glared at me –

Glared at me with sagging lips

Glared at me with pale cheeks

Glared at me with balding brows –

Not because they thought I was mad,

But because they knew all too well:

The trees no longer sang to them.

I dreamed that Shanghai was a simpleton

Who ate glass bottles,

And picked the shards out

From his teeth with a rusty coathanger.

+++

Though many said he would die

From hemorrhaging or tetanus

Coughing his last breaths

In pools of blood and vomit,

He came into his own all too well.

+++

His breath full of fire,

He spat diamonds.

And when he spoke,

The people listened.