Afterglow
by Bai Hua
trs. by Fan Jinghua
This afterglow over Constantinople . . . . over Riga . . .
turns into bliss in his body. He gazes till he cries.
A fugitive’s eyes are particular, and poetic life is always short. What strikes his eyes last disappears first?
By afterglow he sees his forty-year-dead father, rubbing shoulders
in front of General PO Afterglow
— How strange this should happen in last night’s dream of Johor? (Forgotten or remembered, this is a delight.)
This afterglow over Constantinople . . . . over Riga . . .
turns into bliss in his body. He gazes till he cries.
Young Nabokov is another, who punches like his mother when young, with knuckles instead of her fist.
Feb. 11, 2017 Singapore
1923
by Bai Hua
trs. by Fan Jinghua
Why are those gone out at night reluctant to go back home?
Why do words play no more games and they only make love . . .
Not every willow learns young when to withdraw,
Not every man turns bad with one lie;
Down to the Opera House! “Massage at the third floor.”
Love is not always a long-gone childhood.
Not to feel leads to one’s loss, Marathon;
Hear songs in trees, see dances in branches, Breton.
Could there be a Laos afternoon in France? No
News from the driver, let’s go back to the hotel.
Here comes surrealism, and with it, feminine rhyme;
Here comes fair and square, and with it, counterrevolution.
He who loves at the first sight loves abstruse secrets;
Architect students fall in love with a cloud in trousers?
Sept. 22, 2017
Tibetan Antelope
by Gong Xuemin
trs. by Fan Jinghua
Desperate horns, in running, leave scrapes
All over the bloated skin of the sky.
I am not to blame, as lead bullets have taken down the sky of my
family,
And now the sky is small like a snowflake.
I have to run fast to pull this piece of snowflake into a flag,
A white flag, to cover
The colorful carcasses exposed in the TV news.
The hair is thinning on my fur as the temperature rises,
And my heart cools only when I step upward.
My horns become lonely, too fragile to stay stable in the wind,
As one by one my rivals of the same blood have been gunned down.
My lungs are infected by the asthma of off-roaders,
And when I shiver
The grasslands become the scars I cough up and spit to the earth.
My name stays in the heart
Of people who no longer write with hands and it dies with each
stroke;
My name will be increasingly simplified until the entire plateau is
put in pens.
I can only make use of the thin air,
And thin down my name and put it in the textbook
As a vocabulary for the traversing trains.
I can only use shallow grasses to remind the bullet
I am a species of running herbivore,
Like the running of a bullet,
But the bullet won’t listen. It thirsts for blood, for me and all the
creatures.
Inevitably, it will thirst for men who invented it.
Leopard
by Gong Xuemin
trs. by Fan Jinghua
In the 1970s, on the wall behind our county co-op counter
hung a piece of leopard pelt purchased from a peasant.
Bring it on,
I turn the grapeshot from my previous life to blossoms over my
body.
Iron rushes in the wind, and behind me bit by bit the village gets
lost;
The breath of the treetops decays on the green hills,
Diffusing at the speed of iron.
Dawn and dusk are seamed together,
Human traces come between and become
The powerless red despair in my legacy.
I plant iron in the earth, and let it sprout and grow,
As the village turns pale in the tree shade, regretful.
The fist of my pelt takes hold of the iron and runs,
The distance I can cover determines the length of the iron.
The faster I run, the slower the iron,
The longer time the village has for itself to decay.
I fish, with the line I draw with the speed of the running iron,
The dining table of the forest is shrouded with the white cloth of
the sky,
While hungry birds sing. The gold coins over my body
Are baiting the village into flying.
Bring it on,
I have been glorified by the blossoms of grapeshot
And made into the last flag, a verb
Nailed to the wall.