Myself, My Train, and You

I-for two days deprived of sleep

Mind tied in knots. Soon I may have to vomit

I sit on one of the station's marble benches

Reading a paperback-with Borges inside

-maybe in him

Or in my luggage

I can take comfort

Tears brim to a line of text

But do not drip. They do not lightly

Roll from me. I have stored up a whole reservoir

Enough to last me for years

My eyes are getting bad these days

Getting bad enough to understand Borges

Soon the train will pass by the ocean

Where you live. I will see you. I am in your heart

This is squeezing water out of my very bones

Wish I could go back home

But people in the station are more like kinfolk

Wish I could stand up and smile at them

But nobody bothers me

In my secret way

I unfold my wings

Weeping is a form of self-rescue

The train starts moving

Tears are on the window

Moving down in lines

Some will not run readily,

Like the kind of pain

That proceeds in stages

On my own I am more long-suffering

Than the sky above. The sky sobs out loud

Without wetting the suitcase

What is in the suitcase: candle,

Notebook, Dickinson. The nineteenth century

And myself, pressed in each other's palms

Today would be hard to describe as blessed

Cold damp air, no hunger in the gut

Could be worse. The sky looks dusky, dimmed down

As if retreating to the eighteenth century

Having no radio. No lightbulb

Chilly drafts left by the night watchman

Lantern shaded in red. Wilted almond petals falling

Kindling set alight, boil a bowlful of thin noodles-

Ink stone frozen in the master's study

Careless servant sent away

To borrow a fiber-tip pen

In the twenty-first century

He stumbled upon a new name

Tried on a pair of jogging shoes

The master would not recognize

The train is not in the mood to be quiet

We are all drumming up noise for each other

Only one kind of animal is allowed

(-other animals prohibited-)

To fly about outside

Over there at a dead end, Ruan Ji stands crying

Soon he will encounter a train

(-trains like to run on roads that hit dead ends-)

All of us are acting crazy

Saying there is a tavern up ahead

The barmaid comes from the third century

At times she notices subtle things

Pays heed to details of fermentation

You can lie down drunkenly beside her

(-poets line up along the whole train-)

She is able to translate each line of your body

As long as it smells of wine

On the train we keep reading-

"Quagmire" is a word I like

Can reality be surmounted?

The sound of a washing machine

Is like "Mantra of the Constricting Headband"

What machine do you think is capable

Of dissolving contradictions?

On the train we must listen

To steel slamming on steel bars

Pounding one against the other-

Has the universe gotten too narrow?

How does a thing get buried?

Put the train out of mind

Set out from the very beginning-this nothingness

Has been built up

Into a giant monster

Until this sturdily fashioned frame

Comes undone-

(One word I like

Is "quagmire")

Today we will go bounding over a ravine

(another day spent)

Leaping past a cliff

(another day spent)

Leaping over an abyss

(another day spent)

End of a century

Just another day

Start of a century

Just another day

Our intimacy: exchange of looks

Without words. In the darkness

Unaccustomed breathing

Rain falls on passing window

Glass. Commas splash inside,

Sentences are pasted all over the wall

Our passenger train-lit on fire

Slices the dusk apart

At every stop it grabs up poets

When the subject is one’s home district

Where does one begin?

A poet of the sixth century

Mulls over fine points of prosody—

The countenance wavers

But there is cochineal rouge

And an oil lamp

As well as—

Who will go and bring back a few mosquitos

That mosquito net—

Bring back my grandparents

Sudden evidence of existence: a hermit

Wearing a headscarf of black—

Whorled spruce boughs, or a brushwood door

In a snowscape, burning

My heart churning along, hidden

In these mountains

Once the sky stops spinning—every leaf

Floats down

Reach out to catch a branch tip

A juvenile beast goes rambling—my servant boy

Tremulously clutches a seven-string qin

Follows my steps along the path

Winding up and down

A waterfall—my main artery

Comes gushing down

(Noisy fracas of twentieth-century ideologies)

Crossing over this trestle bridge

My donkey brays out loud

A reminder—while I pass through a fourth-century landscape

It brays to let me know:

This is what you can expect of a body

What else besides it

Could make me icy cold

And shivery?

Cooking smoke. Heartbeat of a village

To speak of eternity shames us

Yet it is found therein

The word “wilderness”—this is my

Home district

I think of Baudelaire and Plath

Dickinson and Tsvetaeva

I feed a charcoal fire. From red to black

From gray to white—

I watch over a stove

—Task without a reason

In a time of hibernation

Father’s seat is empty

I turn to the other side

To the train that is Mother

Her voice is low and grating

The person who coughs

Stands between us—

We ride past the ocean

Kinfolk see each other once a year

We can’t help but drink liquor, crack melon seeds

Once we pass a certain stop

Children begin playing

We need children terribly

To make offerings. Keep diaries

Our throats are terribly scratchy

All attention on a single point—

Squeeze out some tears

Throw them into the ocean—

Within the body—