The old lady, left behind,
94, clean and tidy, still living, watching strangers
enter and leave the dim yinziwu, says little.
The middle-aged man, left behind,
got up like a local Qing official, acts the judge in another yinziwu,
amusing tourists and himself, earning a few kuai.
His wife’s still his wife,
her face shining with sweat, rinsing vegetables, chopping noisily,
cooking in the smoky pan.
She hopes to move into a new house on the mountainside, abandon this old place
owned by someone else.
In the thirties, the small warlords left Hongjiang.
In the forties, the bandits left the brothels.
In the fifties, the shopkeepers left their counters after donating airplanes
to the nation.
The coffinmakers’ craft
left to a young man with a middle-school education.
His trade will last till heaven and earth expire, no matter
how the world inverts.
What’s left behind makes good landscapes,
old revolutionary slogans fading on the walls, preserved for tourists,
the intersection where counter-revolutionaries were executed,
preserved for capitalism’s new face.
Yet the old capitalism remains
beneath the farmer’s moon, beneath the rush of the river, the rats’ squeaks,
the high-flown recitations of old ghosts.
Under an ancient oil-trader’s shop
a few tons of gold bars were found, turned over to the government. Who knows
what recirculates? Those with the upper hand, their laughs unbearable.
The waters of the Yuan and Wu still merge where they always did.
The big boat that carried tung oil, will it open to tourists, as the party wants,
towed to its old dock?
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