You Still Keep Falling in Love with Things That Are Fading Away

by Yongbo Ma

There are places you will never visit again, your body
turns elsewhere and keeps drifting on, carrying seeds of light—
yet your heart returns again and again to all the details:
the familiar yet unnamed grass flowers by the hedge,
the pale expressions of empty houses,
the last uninhabited low alley in the village,
the most ordinary rivers on the northern plains that branch and converge.

Why do you keep falling in love with things that are fading away,
like falling in love with countless versions of yourself in parallel worlds?
the repeated turns in front of the mirror, and the hall that darkens quickly after each turn,
like a salvage diver for sunken cargo, wading through tides of forgetting again and again,
only to rescue relics that have lost their form.

The language you use is no different, it is not a fierce beast
no barbed tongue to catch connective tissues and sinews,
but just the soft kisses of a cat, bringing only harmless dampness,
you wish your language could have a metallic taste,
you wish your salvation could also be a ruthless destruction.

Yet you still fall in love with those momentary intersections in their fading:
for example, at the only lit courtyard in the shadow of a mountain,
reciting Yeats’ When You Are Old to enthusiastic strangers,
a young wild boar that scurries away from the path where you walk,
the green ripple before it vanishes into the depths of the cornfield,
and all the uncountable years before you yourself fade away.