DARKENING MIRROR

1

Loving trees and stones: the root of all ethics.

2

The Age advances, and at dusk more girls appear, with tinted hair, beckoning from the roadside. Why not pull over? What have you left to be proud of? Do you really think your noble soul, compared to one of their combs, is more enduring?

3

Though the wine lies heavy on your mind, forgotten wounds stab sharper than a spike.

4

Someday you'll recall the little restaurant buzzing with flies on the edge of Beijing: how we sat gazing at the glorious lights of the far-off Hilton, seeing for the first time how humiliation smites the destitute.

5

Airport shut down, a blizzard madly filling in the sea; no homecoming, but one kind of dialogue, grown difficult.

6

Those who know how to live in deep cold save a plot of earth in the yard to sow sunflowers.

7

Time to take down your ex-lover's painting, but under the eye of the new mistress of the house, where can you put it?

8

Having lived from then till now, belief is hard, but disbelief is terror.

9

Gold corn mouldering, crops rotting in the field. Old man on the doorstep, staring in the soft autumn rain. What makes you turn from bitter glances? Why are you always ashamed to write poems about fruitless human labor?

10

If a donkey claims he's a Great Poet, you bow solemnly, for this is The Land of Poetry.

11

As you grow old, that first thin gleam of scorn in your son's eyes comes like an undeserved gift on a long awaited holiday.

12

This is the music I love, coughs from the audience as the master performs: I resume my seat in darkness.

13

It's not that you're any older; your mirror's just grown dim.

14

It's not that you're any older; dining alone just takes longer.

15

It's not that the hometown girls are loose; just that the sailor back from the storm went blind long ago.

16

Daily you polish your room's pine floor. To prepare for life with a barefoot angel who never appears? There is no angel. From a corner of your ceiling descends a fat spider.

17

You arise in the morning and listen to the organ, at dusk the violin, and evening the piano; but awakened at night, you hear unending silence.

18

Restoring faith in life is like stamping your feet in winter; warmth returns, then you stride off further in the snow.

19

Years since your last trip to the zoo: she's still drawn to the Hall of Snakes, but as you no longer wish to see tigers or swans, you head straight for Monkey Hill, thronged with children.

20

When his lifetime of writing is finished like a term of hard labor, I think he'll step from the room and look far away, murmuring to himself: Child, now I feel the sun's warmth, and from your garden hear your daughter's laughter.