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Xue Di
fromFlames
Shore
The small path leading to lakeside emerges on water. On my way I want tocollect time and smiles. Vision glides across sky’s green gallery.Honeycomb, that distant setting sun — its buzzing wings spread acrosswater, tickle me.
Dusk unfolds gently before me. I leisurelyfinger its colors. Its shadow tries to whisper in my ear, breathyripples across my chest. Grass deepens green. Crickets in my quietwaiting sing toward the night about my age.
Meanderingfootpath on the water: absentmindedly I gather fruit bobbing among lotusleaves. Swaying shadows of lotus pods nuzzle my face. By water’s edge Ihover, vultures one after another circling in my skull release me,disperse toward the forest. A long bench, elegant, settled. Inencircling moonlight about to toll, the bell of pure fragrant youth.
Years soften. Into trees of fluttering lotus flowers, againand again I recite my loneliness. I tear verse from my fingertips andscatter them; light littering shade. Enraptured, I surrender: recline ina boat drifting across the green, searching in water for trails weavingbetween the stars . . .
Frenzy
Let me turn these insanities into lines of poetry for you. When youfirst saw his dark shadow: your eyeballs unbridled, hoof-beats racketedin skull’s canyon.
Let me use words to ravage the wild beast lurking onthe shores of my streaming blood, then throw the lines at your feet.Witness their primordial ferocity.
Let me use my pen to impale ontopaper primitive urges creeping behind your mountainous eyes. Thesepapers spread toward you like a road. You leave behind an animal’s scentwhen you run.
Let me sink my incisors into your collarbone.
Who can lift up this sticky sentence? These words throng. We all arescrawled by a river. Conviction shipwrecked and drifting;
stanzas sink,saturated with desperation. Madness motionless in shadows, windingaround drowned legs, tangling any hope of the living. In voicelesscombat, both sides suffer. Panting savagery through flaring nostrils, Iprovoke you.
I use poetry to plaster the world’s splinteredlimbs. I scourge your face with my affliction. That filthy yellow watermay overflow in your life, breaking against dikes and dams of reason,nourishing soil, nurturing crops and humans. We are mud or awns of wheator grotesque cries of birds hauling delicate shackles. We always mustwrite poetry, singing praises to the sun or another unfamiliarconstellation. Let me disgrace you with derangement gushingconsumptively from my throat.
Words order themselves beforeyou. They surround my heart; blood coagulates under their constriction.At the center of that clot, in heat an animal roars. Do you see itsradiance? Do you see those white birch trees, they lean on each otherlike my lines of verse, linked by grief, line by line. Like me, anxious,hearing butchered tree roots regenerating in my words; like that handthat signs my death sentence, scrawling on my hysteria’s ashes: Love
Flames
Why revere poetry? Because of what it reveals. Like life’s flame at thecenter of the spirit, each word of a poem blazes, illuminating ourdarkness, illuminating an ancient consciousness, oppressed hope andinstincts choked by reason.
Pure works transfix us, deliver up reallife. Behold! We are dumbfounded — !
But the other kind — depictionsof sound and fury, of shallow masochism, hypocritical history and falsevision — all show me a swindler spouting clever rhetoric and charmingwords, or a craftsman tinkering with his tools, conniving with delight.It makes me see buzzing neon, and below, those who sniff out theirdinners like feral cats.
I know my silence threatens to submerge me insuch putrid tidewater. But patience will again lift me out with the palmof its hand, strip away the sewage and decayed leaves smothering mybody. Still, how many aeons has this submersion retarded a country’sart? How long until it erupts, drowning us all, because we do not cryout? This is cowardice and profanity. This is complicity with deception.So I speak.
Poets! Write the whispers of your soul. Write what Powerprohibits. Write yourself: your filth, your transgressive desires, ourhubris, dreams realized and dreams deferred. Poets, transcribe eachbreath that carried you here. Write yourself: your blood, your bones,your tattered flesh.
These biting flames course through my sinews andcortex, in each word they burn. Let my poetry extract birth and deathfrom my pulse, witness scarlet blood and dreams, see glorious ages ofman —all to console my short, wandering role. This path, unburdeningline by line, saves face before my father and mother — birth givers —and my ungiven son.
Readers! As tides of material yearning surge, whatstars wink out in our dark hearts?
I weep. My poems grasp for otherslike me — if but to hold them.
Can it be, only in memory we hear echoesof before? Can it be the only way to discover our dreams is to followimages sparkling in childhood eyes? According to vistas from ourtoddling days, we dream of moments not yet crossed? Can it be, all isirreversible? Only because we are growing old, all of us are growingold! Toxins saturate ‘our’ bodies. Legions of unknown diseases lie inwait, launch our spirits to war. This corporeal battle aborts poetry,distracts us from going beyond ourselves. Is it so? Animals and plantsshame us, so we destroy them. And poets? They can only sing in dreamsand letters, ferociously beating their chests: People! What trash!
Ifear somewhere my son’s unborn eyes chastise me.
Enough! All I can do isreach into my soul and write it exhaustively out. Day and night I listento its voice piercing the center of the flame. It will torment me, killme; in my quest, exposed! It robs me of a lover and progeny — that ischoosing poetry for a wife; my flesh, proof of its own rotting. As forspirit, it suffers evil’s retaliation. But with last breaths I will cry:My lines, my time, all were real, all were mine!
Translated by Alison Friedman