The Fireflies
In the darkness of the cabin
My eyes are open, between city lights
The lake probes again and again the shore
From their habitat on the island
They look up, at the planes’ flickering taillights
And have no complaints, since
Every day, every century
The separation they endure falls like showers
Someone turns on the headlight and eats alone
A star has a sudden epiphany and runs to the horizon
All these are metaphors, thus
The fireflies dance around, like the seeds they sow
And remain in the air
The fireflies now bright now dim
Just as we live but use up all the wisdom
That lights up what’s behind us
At the Candy Shop
Once on the counter of the candy shop
I wrote down a line of poetry, but I
Didn’t write about the candy shop
Or the lady who weighed the goodies, I was
Thinking about other stuff: a horse or a person
Unfolding in a strange place
All the theatres of life, partings, gatherings
A land of letters and tears
I lay in the warm flow of the imagination
And didn’t want to become everyone I’d seen
Like the weeds on a hill that should have grown
In a desolate courtyard rioting through the wild
In the Countryside
In the countryside, we start to talk about fate
On a butcher’s table, we put on a white cloth
To turn it into a conference table
Thus, we can in peace
Put on it our two hands
In other situations, someone says: the bed’s been made
But I don’t know who’s talking
What kind of a hand it is
And the young girl’s face by the kerosene lamp
Sadness or is it shyness
Now a fog from an unknown era outside
Unfurling by the window
I stand as if before a mirror
Into which snow falls white
The Uncanny Town
A person who has lost his homeland looks
Far into the mountains though that’s not his home
After eating its fill, a heron stands by the lake
Waiting for the sun to set
In the shadow of every wall
Someone whispers in a low voice
A month ago, my father died, outside our house
A person stood, waiting to be picked up
The person held a flower in his hand, next to him
A dog on chains squatted
Is the vehicle here now
It seems we are all in our places
It seems dead tree leaves have already
Pointed out all the directions
Four Poems
Ye Hui
translated from the Chinese by Dong Li
Read the original in Chinese, Simplified
Listen to "The Fireflies" read in the original by the poet:
Ye Hui is a poet of a rare kind. He lives in the same countryside where he was born and raised, and his writing keeps growing from the same rain and clouds. One could compare him to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, as Ye clerks in a taxation office, daydreaming of the contemporaneousness of all ages and countries. Unlike Pessoa, his alter egos exist in the real world. An architect bred of poetry, he built his own spacious house and sits out his free hours in a tiny room, “rioting through the wild,” pouring out one poetry collection every ten years. Ye is arguably the only metaphysical poet in China, as he weaves metaphysics into real-life snapshots and creates compelling collages of contemporary myths and mysteries. A local candy shop becomes a “warm flow” of seething imagination. The terror of “our two hands” on the butcher’s table shifts to a mirror-image of the self “unfurling by the window” as snow falls. Anything can happen and does happen in a Ye Hui poem. Even dead leaves can give “all the directions.” His is a poetry that “falls like showers,” with and release of energy that gives everything a new rinse and shine. No wonder he named his house “the villa of showers.” These four poems serve as a warm welcome.
Ye Hui is an acclaimed Chinese poet. His latest collection 遗址 (The Ruins), selected from an oeuvre of thirty years, was published by Elegant People Books/Changjiang Literature & Art Publishing House in 2020. His poems in English translation have appeared or are forthcoming in 128 Lit, The Arkansas International, Bennington Review, Guernica, and Lana Turner.
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He is the English translator of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant-winning The Gleaner Song (Giramondo & Deep Vellum, 2021) by the poet Song Lin, and The Wild Great Wall (Deep Vellum, 2018) by the poet Zhu Zhu. His debut collection of poetry, The Orange Tree, was published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2023 as the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.
