by Xue Di

Bright Landscape
     translated by Waverly and Keith Waldrop

In the extension of family he’s called Xue
mature child remembered
Watches clouds.  Regards waters
Tilts his body to the wind
Reworks old work in a warm shelter
Character changed by continual rewriting
His love of a local girl is like the
bend in a river.  His face thins
when animated.  Agape, his
eyes resemble two deer in a race
uphill.  Who listens along the grasslands
makes less sound than a spell of crickets
Dimmer than distant peaks

Calling Xue.  When he turns
his poetry now comprehends the dark
Scattered over the page are people in clusters
scribbled and rescribbled portions of the poem
black patches of the sort that make historians
sigh.  The state disappears under
the pen of self-pitying cartographers
A drove of stallions courses lightly.  The valley to the
left, pace by pace, disappears
from the lone sightseer’s memory

Those who only now see him call him Xue
An abandoned stable the shape of melancholy
The smallest mare in classical beauty among
haystacks a hermit has piled
A wildcat prowls at the edge of the forest
The traveler on foot feels lonely.  Trudging
uphill, he realizes maturity
Ahead, the road forks

by Xue Di

Celia
     translated by Hil Anderson and Sue Ellen Thompson

I see you, with your panther eyes and the body of a lamb
among the cut gems of summer
laughing.  Your body leaning forward
in the lush, sunlit grass
hiding two locusts whole only desire is to leap.
Summer spreads its palm
over the land.  A child
sees the sediment of the adult world
reflected in the tear from an animal’s eye.  My
Celia:  when I speak your name
I feel sinfully guilty
I feel love, so pure
and cool it is like
laughter washing over me.
My nerves are so frayed
they can only sing remembered songs,
relying on memory’s keen palate.
I think of how young you are
compared to my nearly forty years.
I still write whole poems
for the sake of a single word, sacrificing a tuft of hair
for each line, my tears flowing in the dark.
Then the shame
of my effort, knowing that you
are my subject.

A child with panther eyes and the body of a lamb
In the summer of 1993, running
like a startled deer.  The news is rife
with murder and sex.  A poet
who is ashamed to say he writes poems,
a rock star threatened by scandal.

What I’m talking about is
spirit.  On a night like this, downcast,
I think of spirit.  Because summer
is closing its hand around me
I think of my gem, my Celia.

by Xue Di

First Love
     translated by Wang Ping and Keith Waldrop

Calling ceaselessly your name
in order to feel how I was caught and
plunged into birth
I cried, meaning to refuse the un-
welcoming world
Pain contains me
frightened and confused
calling your name
Nightmare clutches me
My heart is torn by hungry
wolves within my flesh

First love, like a mirror
broken.  Pain
of my birth, life’s
pain.  Love leads me by the nose
I’m in a hard grip
pulled along.  Wolves
prowl in all directions

by Xue Di

Seven Years
     translated by Waverly and Keith Waldrop

Walking on broken glass, living
in a city whose dialect I don’t speak

Feet infected, walking my own way
things persisting back of the flesh, bringing

thoughts to fruition.  Making hands
hold back, there where the dark stands out.  Speech

reaching to where we have not reached
Labor without end.  Loneliness, then a precise

word.  In a local crowd:  stronger
than some new kind of language