drifting in the land of sun
1.
i slither naked and silent through ribbons of streets of lakes, submerging in the clean biting wind day after day to release my raw joints, neverminding the sky’s burning arrows that pierce and ignite my displaced birthmarks my palimpsest of buried scars accumulating electricity beneath the skin
am blind on the main road of crowded footsteps am deaf to the loudspeaker’s moralizing noise am the reckless child am the homeless elder am the countryless human
without neck-twisting regret at intersections.
without decorating images of a poet-moth drunk on life’s darkness drunk on death by candle flame
the streets here are not Paris Rimbaud has died everywhere could be electric Africa
i watch the sun dissolve in water lifeless drifts a rotten eye.
2.
who survives this storm besides breathlessly the storm spares its survivals
a dust vortex blankets the earth shrinking the knees of quivering sparrows
which pirate obliterates the sails of our drunken boat? where is the wind rising from? how to clean the stench of blood from greedy hands?
how can i be still when every morning i stagger into mutely contorted dreams and soft kisses of impenetrable darkness on the narrow bed?
where have the wide desperate eyes of a gloomy youth been lost to?
bodies soft and drooping bodies worn out and collapsing bodies descending an abyss nerve fibers fearing and scorning self-destruction toes grasping the slippery road naively following ghosts as if everything is fate
what makes me always so broken, so miserable, so self-tormenting as a ripe fruit who cannot mask its ugly worm-bitten scars
noisy head chatter sneers brightly into the hopeless face of someone vainly searching for a real-face-of-earth pulsing breath into the hearts and voices
the ones arriving to their final moments do not cease playing and loving crystal-clear-unto-death
i dunk into the monsoonal seasons of cold sunlight
i dunk into the wavy seasons of uncalm love
i gorge on poetry as hunger gorges on bánh mì then licks up every last crumb
but what makes me always so broken, so miserable, so self-tormenting
how could i blame poetry blame everyday life blame the clamping heart blame my sad homeland of ripe suns sprawling through streets
what pulls me back up after stumbling into silent ropes
night is flooding, it’s just us who are left bleakly circling the graves of fallen suns.
3.
i hear poetry’s murmur and feel the raised skin of a leather book where darkness tunnels
a sleepless drunk wanders in search of his monstrous knocked-out eyes
poetry walks the pavement on its two cat-like legs but flushes an agitated hot pulse beneath velvety skin
poetry circulates blood to the tips of long wiry fingers reaching and worming into black accidental alleyways of imagination’s specialty
a moon suddenly drips honey into a heart
and threads its way
flowing
into each cell of bright blood
the words sip the breath of moon and rise from the night from the memory of mother’s breast from the pulsing blood from the first cries from the first footsteps of humankind
4.
love places in my hand a flower and around my neck a rope i must go an entire life.
love pushes a line a poetry choking darkly in the chest
i grind stones on my body i freeze my body stiff i cover myself in graveyard silence i fling mud at the suns the moons the stars i test myself to follow the ordered path of a house cow who doesn’t know how to bellow out moans
but the blood in my fingertips sprouts a sun-seed awakening and desolate in blushing red a self-exposed condition impossible to hide
we hug our shrivelling bodies together, inhale, exhale, love rigorously, inhale ferociously find the breath of life.
5.
at the lip of an abyss, we’ll play-dive off its cliff
play-tumble down its depths perhaps blood will burst into birdsong
an abyss may be the real-face-of-earth heaving breath into hearts and voices we still scour in search of
an abyss may be a sun-seed blushing red a desolate awakening
an abyss may be reserving some poetry for those who need its roots to suck and squeeze to stay inside the cycle of play-tumble
ah, we cannot resist the game, the lip of an abyss welcomes the risk-takers who refuse themselves permission to fail
don’t ask again: not failing for what
no one can occupy the tiny grains of life and death
this is when we place hand over hand, when we peel back layer after layer of the shadowy scales sticking to the face, the skin, the eyes speaking to each other about Love (and/ which is) Imaginative Play, the labored birth of suns newly blushing red awaken life in a sad homeland.
displaced birthmarks crackle as they flow.
a piece of a buried scar produces electric roaring roaring explosion.
time
start:
dreaming decays, the void slipsslips from a yawn-opened body with every waking
current of drifting thoughts, fears, and the excruciating things that come when they disappear, only the thoughts stay, only they are what’s left to cling to
shirt buttons pop, memory cheats, one Loser
solution:
lie still lie still, avoid collisions with air, ever so gradually, the depletion
is replenished with love, with the icy, the scorching, the sorrowful, the youthful, the palpitating
dig again, more, push on forever with unsteady steps into long black tunnels, only opening into light’s immensity in the last
again return to torment, a pitch black planet of not one pebble, not one blade of grass
caress the hair, the chest, the arms, ten fingers, one thousand strands of leg fur, only speak words that leave lesions
solitude: beautiful, fatigued, worn out, blindingly drunk, crisply somber, quiveringly happy, basking the body in velvet, vividly soft
consequence:
insane predator, lava floods, scalding the real life
flimsy body, a leaf wrecked by time, rain, mist that eats the whole flesh, thin veins cling to their form
time is the mist, is the salty blood withdrawn and fleeing the body
until a pestle is upturned on the head resting in bed, and eyes sink below an ink black sky
conclusion.
from Edge of the Abyss
Nhã Thuyên
translated from the Vietnamese by Kaitlin Rees
Click here to read more poetry by Nhã Thuyên, and here for her essay on Nguyễn Quốc Chánh, both from the Fall 2015 issue. We also recommend this essay by Kelly Morse on Nhã Thuyên from our Fall 2019 issue.
Read the original in Vietnamese
Listen to the original read by the poet:
It can be said that Vietnamese is a grammatically loose language; it can be called ambiguous for the ways a subject or a verb may sometimes disappear without consequence, or adjectives may float around not clearly modifying anything in particular, or the same adjectives may just as well be verbs in the line. In the collection from which these two poems originate, Ria Vực || The Edge of the Abyss, published by Giấy Vụn || Scrap Paper Press in 2011, Nhã Thuyên seems to yield to the subconscious and lean into those empty spaces where Vietnamese grammar does not grip a direct or tight path of meaning. As well, the poems collage unrelated images and effectively melt space-time-meaning through inverted syntax and estranged punctuation.
But I want to wonder about the word ambiguous: by what standard that word means anything at all, how it is applied to many Asian languages when comparisons to English are evoked, and how it’s often presented as a challenge or barrier to translation.
tình yêu [love] đẩy bật [pushes] [drives] câu thơ [line of poetry] tức nghẹn [tightness] [choking] trong [inside] ngực [chest] tối [dark]. Is love pushing poetry up out of the chest or down into the chest? Is it love or poetry being choked on? In whose dark chest? Such questions might be asked to clarify the line in English. But also, I want to just hear the gagging and let this sound be its own subject lingering among the subjects of love, darkness, poetry, and a body’s breathing/beating place. Can these subjects be certainly related without a single/certain relationship?
A question I rarely have an answer to is how to beautifully and ethically let English be opened, abandoned, forgotten, to let it be bent, stretched, squeezed, and pressed, in order to bring it a bit closer to the languages that feed it, especially in translation. I think Nhã Thuyên’s earlier work here teaches me to read in more capacious ways that I do not wish to frame as challenges to overcome, but rather as invitations to uncement myself from the grammaring of my own subconscious. As a human among other humans and nonhumans, perhaps this may be a way to touch the “real-face-of-earth.”
I would like to thank Tạ Hương Nhi for her important insights in the editing process of these poems.
But I want to wonder about the word ambiguous: by what standard that word means anything at all, how it is applied to many Asian languages when comparisons to English are evoked, and how it’s often presented as a challenge or barrier to translation.
tình yêu [love] đẩy bật [pushes] [drives] câu thơ [line of poetry] tức nghẹn [tightness] [choking] trong [inside] ngực [chest] tối [dark]. Is love pushing poetry up out of the chest or down into the chest? Is it love or poetry being choked on? In whose dark chest? Such questions might be asked to clarify the line in English. But also, I want to just hear the gagging and let this sound be its own subject lingering among the subjects of love, darkness, poetry, and a body’s breathing/beating place. Can these subjects be certainly related without a single/certain relationship?
A question I rarely have an answer to is how to beautifully and ethically let English be opened, abandoned, forgotten, to let it be bent, stretched, squeezed, and pressed, in order to bring it a bit closer to the languages that feed it, especially in translation. I think Nhã Thuyên’s earlier work here teaches me to read in more capacious ways that I do not wish to frame as challenges to overcome, but rather as invitations to uncement myself from the grammaring of my own subconscious. As a human among other humans and nonhumans, perhaps this may be a way to touch the “real-face-of-earth.”
I would like to thank Tạ Hương Nhi for her important insights in the editing process of these poems.
Nhã Thuyên has recently published two books in English translation: un\ \martyred: [self-]vanishing presences in Vietnamese poetry (Roof Books, 2019) and moon fevers (Tilted Axis Press, 2019). Her poetry book words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (từ thở, những người lạ) was published in Vietnamese (Nhã Nam, 2015) and in English with translation by Kaitlin Rees (Vagabond Press, 2016). With Kaitlin Rees, she founded AJAR, a micro-bilingual literary journal-press, an online, printed space for poetic exchange. She soliloquizes and makes some nonsense when having no other emergencies of life to deal with.
Kaitlin Rees betweens Hanoi and New York City. With Nhã Thuyên, she founded AJAR and the intimate international poetry fest, A-festival. Her translations of Nhã Thuyên’s poetry include one full-length collection, words breathe, creatures of elsewhere (Vagabond Press, 2016) and a forthcoming manuscript of nonsense. She currently works at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, editing the Transpacific Literary Project.
