Lines Around China
Qiu Xialong
Copyright 2003 by Qiu Xiaolong.
Published
by Neshui Publishing via Smashwords
Acknowledgement
In this collection I have included some of the poems written in the last four years, a period in which I have been busy working on novels and translations, and have made frequent trips to China. This is why the collection is divided into three parts. The poems of the first section, Lines Out of China, were written in the US. Lines in China are pomes written during my trips there, as well as some translations of poems I had written years earlier in Chinese. Cathay Revisited is a result of my dialogue with classical Chinese poets in the translation of their works.
I want to thank my friends Mona Van Duyn, Jarvis Thurston, Carol Wantz and Susan Lagunoff, who have not forgotten to ask about my poems when reading my novels and translations. I especially want to thank Michael Castro, who carefully read the manuscript and gave me valuable suggestions. But for their wonderful support, this volume would exist only as unfinished computer files.
In October, during a
book tour in San Francisco, Caroline Cummins interviewed me about my
novel A Loyal Character Dancer, and then I read a not-too-surprising
statement in the review published afterward: “Poetry is his proxy.”
She may be right. I hope so.
Some of the poems here have appeared in my novels, as well as in magazines, though they have been modified slightly since then.
Qiu Xialong
2003
Lines
Out of China
Birds of Time
Afterwards, your
hair
still wet from shower, shopping
at the Shanghai First
Department Store,
you wound yourself up in a plush
duckling
waddling on the counter, squawking.
“After each
time, you buy me a fluffy darling—
In one year, we’ll have a
room
full of swaggering sillies.”
It’s silly, but so were
many other things,
we contemplated – the long line standing
for
American visas, curving
overnight into a huge question mark,
an
old waiter’s shock at us sharing
a tiny bowl of noodles, or
Eliot saying
April is the cruelest month.
It’s April,
hyacinth blossoming
out of your bare arms
into the heart of the
neon light
ceaselessly changing, as the world
in our
interpretation.
Then—
Separation
surprising
reunion, and unsurprising
separation, in another country.
Time
flies, before your voice
finally flutters back, still
familiar,
yet laden with the travel fatigue
of an investment
banker
in an unexpected international call,
“Now I make a
deposit wherever
I cut a deal, Toronto, Hong Kong, Melbourne,
or
Tokyo. We’ve bought a Porsche
and a Bostonian condo overlooking
a lake
where swans come and go.
In Shanghai today. Still
remember—
two literature students, years ago, too poor
to
afford a roast Beijing duck
in a shabby restaurant?”
At night, the dry
creek
under my bay window appears
skeleton white in the
moon,
no bird there.
Café Talk
Creamy coffee,
cold;
toy bricks of sugar cubes
crumbling, a butter blossom
still
reminiscent of natural freedom
on the mutilated cake,
the
knife aside, like
a footnote. It is said
some people can tell
the time
by the change of color
in a cat’s eyes—
but you
can’t.
Doubt, a heap of ancient dregs
from the bottle of
Great Wall
rests in the sparkling wine.
Under the play of
neon lights
the Uygur girl on the wall
is carrying grapes to
you:
infinite motion, light
as a summer in grateful tears
when
a bit of the golden paint,
under her bangled bare feet,
flakes
from the frame around her.
Nothing appears more
accidental
than the world in words.
A rubric turns by chance
in
your hands, and the result,
like any result, is called history.
Through the window
we see no star.
Mind’s square deserted, not a pennant
left.
Only a rag picker of the ages
passes by, dropping scraps
of
every minute into her basket.
Justification
A withered tree
turns out to be
ideal for the termites, which
legitimate the
noise of
a philosopher-billed woodpecker
in the woods, where a
henpecked hunter
skulks in dread of his wife,
half-heartedly
raising his gun.
Once, a girl
lectured me
on politics and logic, her
bare shoulder
rippling
under my palm: “Do whatever
you want; you’ll
always find reasons
later.” An apple rolled
out of her
picnic hamper. Snatches
of a pipa melody drifted
from a blue
boat. I lost myself
in her cascading hair, which
smelled of
barbecued ribs.
Birthday Night
3:30 A.M. A Dog
barks
against the moon-bleached night.
Is the dog barking
into my dream
or am I dreaming of the dog?
Failure to See Yuanlu Off
How long ago was Li
Bai moved
by his friend’s song
on parting at Peach Blossom
Lake—
one early autumn morning,
a lone sampan sailing
into
the ceaselessly warring clouds
of the mid-Tang dynasty?
The wind that breaks
a petal
breaks me.
By the Missouri
River,
April’s cruelest fingers are fastening
onto a hook a
bait of cricket—
or a bait of me?
Oh, the pierced brown
wings
that start scratching a muffled note.
At the moment of
leaving,
your lectures on Oriental poetry
still undelivered, do
you hear it,
Yuanlu, my singing in another language,
hollow as
the broken wings
screeching toward Lambert Airport?
Gargoyle
It was on a
hillside, Jingshan Park, Forbidden City,
where the Qing Emperors
had succeeded
the Ming Emperors, we sat
on a slab of rock
there, watching
the evening spread out against the tilted eaves
of
the ancient, splendid palace.
Below us, waves of buses
flowed
along the Huangchen Road – a moat,
hundreds of years
ago. We murmured
words in Chinese, then in English
we were
learning. the bronze stork,
which had once escorted the Qing
Dowager
stared at us. You dreamed of us becoming
two
gargoyles, you told me,
at Yangxing imperial hall, gurgling
all
night long, in a language comprehensible
only to ourselves. A
mist
enveloped the hill. We saw a tree
hung with a white board
saying
“It’s on this tree that Emperor Chongzhen
committed
suicide,” reminding me
of the blackboard hung round my father’s
neck
during the Cultural Revolution. The evening
struck me as
too cold. We left the park.
Later, I left the country.
Tonight,
sleepless
in St. Louis, fired from a bagel shop
for my Chinese
accent, I think
of you again – still gurgling,
gurgling on
the hillside of Jingshan,
through the night, in a language
all
of your own?
The shop neon sign
says:
Gargoyle.
Dover Peach
Here I am, standing
with the girl
who once stood with Matthew Arnold
on the Dover
beach, then
with Anthony Hecht too, now we find
ourselves in
the penthouse
of the Shanghai Hotel, overlooking
the Bund
stretching along the Huangpu River
in the ebb and flow of neon
lights
like the folds of a bright girdle
unfurled. she’s
pretty, you
know, with all her professional makeup,
almost
perfect on the television:
CEO, Dover Peach Cosmetics
Incorporation
marketing her new product to China.
Too busy,
she’s forgotten all about Sophocles,
but not the origin of her
brand name.
“Poor old Matthew,
he clutched me
like his last straw, moaning
with the
melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
of passion, and then weeping
about the helpless receding Sea of Faith,
though like
everybody else, he got such a lot
out of me. Royalties, critics’
raving, not
to mention the ravishing time
with y undulating
body – the waves…
begin, and cease, and then again
begin.
Anthony’s much worse, thinking
how to capitalize Matthew
through
me, his dirty whiskers
tickling my bare back, moon-blanched,
with
tremulous cadence slow
and fast, and he got those lines
anthologized,
and his tenure secured. Did he bring me
a bottle
of Nuit d’Amor? No. I took him
out of pity. Not you, President
Joe,
of East-West, you know how to ripen me
into a real Dover
Peach,
juicy, palatable, bursting to your touch.
Oh, you don’t
have to be jealous.
I’m telling you the stories
about those
poor, pathetic men of letters
as you can make the best use of
it
in our marketing campaign.”
In the soft light,
her small toe,
dainty, snowy, as creamy as a scallop
in the
hotel chef’s midnight special.
I’m starving again.
Afterwards,
in
lingering ecstasy, I forget myself
and murmur about “ignorant
armies clash
by night,” a fragment I analyzed years ago
in my
unfinished dissertation,
a business secret I have kept from her.