Four Poems

To the Old Town
 
Slowly, the bus snakes through slough-
like narrow streets, distressed by the lime-
breached Chinese cedars and the tedious word
of “home.” The white-gray winter light
falls on plastic benches, as if rubbing out
rocks and hills in a Wen Zhengming painting.
I catch a glimpse of a girl before a closet
lifting her green-apricot breasts and scrubbing
the dressing mirror that continues to swell.
Grandfather puts the rusty watering can
aside and shouts something. What is it?
The smell of alum and kerosene lingers
in the cupboard, his whole life in frugality
cursing a small piece of confiscated land,
the wet and cold of it all.
It is June, and hydrangeas bloom,
the auditorium somber, and at midnight,
the delayed melancholic whistle of a steamer.
An empty-headed boarder
comes this way, The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann under his arm,
cold coffee grounds and the cheers of a stadium
churning in his stomach. A crowd swarms,
long lines outside grocery stores that sell
cigarettes, hard candies, and rags.
Our gold-toothed eccentric neighbor,
Uncle Jialiang, runs all the way
to spit on the skirts of young ladies.
In front of Huang Tian Yuan, Maternal Grandfather,
covered in bruises, loosens up the slab
tied around his waist and is about to order,
as per usual, noodles brewed in the first broth of the day,
and then spend half a day at the bathhouse.
Another uncle absentmindedly pulls on his suede boots,
a cigarette in his mouth, dips the blade in soapy water,
and shaves. I love everything about him,
wild and undisturbed, with a bit of sly.
But the disarrayed ravens are fluttering,
and between bulldozers and ruins, the Grand Canal
flows sluggishly, leaving behind not a single reflection.
There’s no one to stop the informers,
or to keep them away from rotten staircases.
Those I love are destined to die.
Amid the unoccupied passenger seats,
a radio hisses, there’s singing
“Why not throw ourselves into the ocean?” . . .
It is so damn lonely, and I think
of your sighs, mascara smudging in the rain,
and your last words—“Hurry up, hurry up!”
But I am just a boy kicking around the whole time
in the street, agonizing over cavities
or white lies, who never realizes that someday,
life flits away, faster than the fleeting stop signs.
The bus makes a sudden turn
through two side rows of leafless trees.
I see them holding their lunch boxes,
motionless, looking back mutely,
as if to pretend that another bus is coming.
The sun rises and shines upon the asphalt road
underfoot, vanishing and opening out.
Every face is now glistening with death.



In the Country Quarry
—In Memory of Uncle Wang Yirong
 
Suntanned, skin-and-bones, he gets on
like a concrete ship ready to transport gravel.
And already shattered to pieces.
He squats on a chair and takes his time licking
Huangjiu that he bought from the cooperative.
As usual, the neighbor’s dogs run over, scratching
the table legs, eager for bones that he tosses.
 
A step outside, this year’s snow shimmers
on the lake, just like last year’s willow catkins.
I see an older child sweeping on the high levees
toward Taihu Lake, a straw hat slung across his body,
his swift bare feet stirring up a cloud of dust.
Far off, a string of speckled light twinkles.
He drops his fishing rod and parts the smooth, silky water.
 
“Just at that moment,” his pupils light up,
his mouth agape with rotten teeth.
An insistent cough follows.
The rouge flush on his cheekbones remains
like a stagnant sunset through summer. I hang my head
as if back on the sunburned dirt road to the village,
where a silicosis patient with a wicker hat
in his hand is flashing out a chest X-ray
as if to show off—“Look, here, and there.”
 
Yes, I have seen it all and then—
Everything comes back to me.
As I shove a change of clothes and homework
for the summer into my schoolbag and unwillingly
scramble onto the cramped backseat of a bicycle
for the country, like a greeting card
from the fertile world, he bribes me with a clear bay
and many a night as brilliant as silver.
 
He speaks no more and falls
into a long drunken stupor with drooped eyelids.
Forty years, he lives silently in the narrow country,
gripping his chest and gasping for breath,
until his song of intellectual youth breaks
into a torn bellows that snorts and grunts
—blown by fate, not the other way around.
 
He walks me to the station with a hunched back,
darting along the high, steep levees,
as if the slight crunching sound of snow
embarrasses him. Out of the blue, he stops
to look at the abandoned quarry in the distance.
A hand tractor with its bucket removed
is parked in the belly of the hill.
 
Unknowingly, my hand touches his,
rough and stiff, a strange novelty,
as if I am dragged out of his noisy barn
again. And the cow in labor
half-kneels in the hay, chewing
something hard—“Don’t look back!
Or your heart will soften like a lady.”



Maternal Grandmother’s House
 
The senior caretaker, older than her,
makes tea on the stove. We wait in the chamber
as she fumbles to get dressed. Mother keeps rubbing
her stiff knees and grumbles about the dampness
of a snowy day, the lengthy restraint
of the sloping roof, the leaking gable, and the faint
refracted skylight. This dilapidated place
possesses an anesthetized peace:
the half-open cupboard, the cups stacked
askew, and a few rusty tinplate cans.
 
A twinkle of silver from her dentures, a smile
on her face, she hobbles along, holding onto the wall,
her thin white hair pulled back into a bun. I watch
in awe as she stands swiftly on tiptoe
before taking her seat, as if this imperceptible gesture
has more to do with ritual than dignity.
Now her voice, a wet sponge,
comes close to cover some names,
pensions, and other trivialities only she remembers,
like milk toffees glued together in a candy jar.
“Ugh, really—” She quietly shakes her head
and heaves a long sigh that doesn’t feel disheartened.
 
Twilight floats under the eaves in this small town.
I walk toward her chamber, the familiar poster bed,
and the makeup mirror that has scratches everywhere.
Next to her pillow, a pocket radio hisses,
which she forgot to turn off, as if the ghosts of woes
in a fable still sway in the lasting flame
of a single candle. I lie down as I did as a child
and sit up again in horror—facing the bed, two frames
lean awkwardly into each other: she in the colored one,
Maternal Grandfather in the black and white.
From the year I came to this world . . . a widow!
Like a knife through the slats stabs this very word.
 


Smoke
 
Under the gas lamp, a cast-iron teapot sizzles
with warm air. A cloudy square window
reflects bonsais and the simple slight sorrow
of a child copying a landscape of rivers
and mountains that are about to reach winter.
 
Snow flutters down the calendar in the parlor:
in the peaceful Xiyuan Temple, the mid-lake pavilion
is shrouded by the dusk of a few dynasties . . .
Suzhou is now far; Nanjing is equally gloomy.
 
I think of Grandfather in his slumber
wearing a cotton robe. His scraggly hand
drops from the smoking chaise lounge to the floor,
as if still tugging at his tumultuous century.
 
It is the same spastic hand,
whose skin wrinkles like windswept tiles,
that shovels black bricks in the corridor,
a streak of mares’ tails at the sky’s edge,
 
and the despondent oleanders.
A bagmoth lolls an afternoon with a hanging string.
A votive candle burns silently at night
under the sinking coir mattress.
 
Suzhou is a winter morning in fog.
A child scribbles on the square windowpane
while breathing on his frostbitten hands.
Each stroke grows clearer after the next.
 
As Suzhou finds no way out,
you are the first to hope for an escape,
from the scoffing rock formations
and the inert clouds drifting over the patio.
 
Nanjing stays behind a blurry porthole.
An old-time ferry with tail smoke sails
to the middle of the river, blaring a shrill horn
like a fire truck rushing to the rescue.
 
Between two windows, nothing has taken place:
the two selves wordlessly look each other
in the eye with the same spite and sneer.
Perhaps I have not yet found the road
 
to the wide world, except for the copied landscape,
whose clumsy strokes remain lifeless, except for
the scrambling child, who finds himself having moved
 
no more than two hundred kilometers
on the diverging railway tracks. Now he stops
to look at the gathering twilight: kind of
a superficial soft focus, illusory
 
like a fog machine, but enough to console.
Obscurity is my way of getting at things.
In the wake of smoke, a silhouette of a ferry
emerges as an acid rain pours over the iris.