DENIS MAIR
ANSWERS TO TANG COMPADRES
**
We have wandered for years
In the forest of motives
Some explored the pathways
Some lay in wait for others
At last I’m lying back immersed
In what I have come through
**
Cold has pierced our hearts
We have made nature sympathize with us
We even spell out pity in trampled petals
The next step is keeping each other warm
**
War has devastated the Shaanxi fields
Now they are overgrown with green
Clouds of trouble run before the wind
Birds get lost in the distance
All that he looks at, he feels in his chest
**
Half of Du Fu’s friends are ghosts
So what does that make him?
His boat is tethered to a garden full of them
He floats downriver trailing a fogbank
**
Why does that beauty lean against bamboo?
Isn’t that better than leaning in a doorway!
But it is hard to get support from bamboo
Still she endorses that slender stem
The way Michael Jordan endorses Nikes
**
Du Fu dreamed of sharing a hermitage with Li Bai
They would take immortal medicine together
Make their tree of poetry grow beyond this world
Du Fu admired the mountain priest
The wild swordsman of his youth
But Li Bai was on the banquet circuit
Still, when they met and talked poetry
Something still vibrated from gut to gut
This was good for inspiration
But Du Fu had great love for this world
That he could only show through his family
**
A disturbing presence to welcome in one’s dream:
This man whose soul was haggard with care
He had thrown in his lot with the wrong prince
And he died where friends could not bury him
But the two men had knit their souls together
Their words were crucibles for each other
So the friend who outlived the other
Had to sum up their loss and gain
**
Shengdai—the “sagely reign”
Was a word for that golden age
Used by people who lived in it
But that was before their cosmopolitan era
Was shattered by rebellions
Now that once-proud phrase comes to light
Flung into unlikely corners
Such as the name of a pretty Japanese girl
**
I’ve heard of ways some people found fame in the capital
A hermitage on Zhongnan Mountain was supposedly their short-cut
What a joke! That mountain is piled with human bones
**
Wang Wei tells of an old man
Leaning against his cane
He measures hours of waning light
Waiting for a herdboy to come home
But Wang Wei himself is the old man
Waiting for a madman to sing
Needing something to look forward to
**
Dream of a beautiful girl among the mulberries
But seeing how she was selected for the harem
Took the edge off of Wang Wei’s fantasy
**
Above the tower of brick
An unseen crystalline tower continues upward
Once the trees are reduced to green velvet
What experiment can a poet try?
**
A troubadour strides across the landscape of history
He has heard a new summons to worship
Sounded from the bell of a woman’s dress
But he grew up sword-fighting with other horsemen
How can he stop trying to impress them?
**
I am the cup he poured his wine into
Words he spoke get written in my poems
Low cloud and valley mist make one mist
**
Path of words to a mountain hut
A window-scene of rainy pines
Where his absence is embedded
Our loneliness goes to pay a visit
Along words designed to omit him
**
We borrow geese as a figure of distant flight
Then continue leading the life they fly over
We rarely visit the remote shores
Where geese can safely rest their wings
In tired hours we need to imagine them
**
The old hermits went to a place
Where we revisit their quietness
Among plants that will keep growing
But you trust your seclusion to a media screen
I hope the plug to cyberspace is never pulled
Otherwise, what space will ever remember you?
**
The poets of our network
Look earthward for their open space
Their panorama is access to other hearts
They ride the currents of human feeling
The way an eagle rides an updraft
**
Behold this party of cloud-borne immortals
Each looks off into a different distance
Where they have pledged to join each other
In a party of immortals…
*** ** ***
QUESTION FOR A WINDOW-GAZER
In the barbershop I often walked past
I used to see fantasy books through the window
Sword-bearing elves and chimerical beasts on the covers
Raymond Feist, David Eddings, The Sword of Shahara
They were tossed onto the barber’s personal shelf
Next to a row of hair-cream bottles
Every month a different grouping of titles
I sometimes saw the barber between haircuts
Reading in one of his customer chairs
I have been in and out of town so often
I can’t pin down when the difference happened
No more change in that grouping of books
Four or five leaning, two of them flat
Picture of colorful castle fading in the sunlight
Always at that same left-behind angle
The barber on slow afternoons, sitting in his chair
No reading matter in his hands
It’s been at least two years now
It must have been sometime after September 11th
Some equally wrenching impact
In the sphere of his personal life
Broke the threads to his fond imaginings
I have no interest in his cloud-capped towers
It’s something I passed on the way to a coffee shop
But I wonder—what made him stop?
And last week, the second week of September
My roving eye registered a new question mark
In the window, next to that old group of books
For the first time, a cover in black and white
A news photo of people all gesturing tensely
*** ** ***
THAT GOTHETTE
I look back into your story
Like veins in this pendant of agate
You had the face of a lady biochemist
Who fled the laboratory to become an artist
You had luminous white skin
To myself I called you “That Gothette”
Your father was a famous physicist
He tied together a network of seismic sensors
Predicted a major earthquake in Shandong
Three months before the Tangshan Quake
200,000 people dead in 1976
The government was caught flat-footed
I guess it was something like “Katrina” for them
Maybe it shook China out of her Maoist dream
You got a special education from geophysicist Dad
Heard all his dinner talk about earth sciences
Memorized the classical poems he loved
He even had you recite poems in English
I don’t know why you didn’t finish high school
Your father belonged to a special research unit
With his clout he arranged for home-schooling
Again in college you only lasted three months
You turned into a genuine recluse
You copied seal-style characters from dictionaries
Collected folk songs and old-time lyrics
Wrote sheaves of poems outside of any social scene
Archaic brew whipped in a post-modern blender
With your own punk energy and a touch of sci-fi
You reminded me of Emily Dickinson
Around thirty, still living at home
Until you watched that TV doc about a guard
This was a prison guard who painted portraits
He painted the criminals he guarded every day
Not just a prison guard, but an artist
And some kind of wild man who said
“Officials should hang my pictures in the Statehouse
It’s time they looked human nature in the face!”
Yes an artist, but due to barroom brawls as a student
His art school recommended him for the worst kind of job
“Go to that prison and run the inmate art class” he was told
The prison trained him to be a high-security guard
Anyway he looked like an intelligent inmate
Too bad, the art program never got off the ground
But he had an art program of his own
Every day after work, he’d paint for hours
Immortalized the faces of rapists and thugs
Until his work was spotted by Ai Weiwei
That great renegade was putting together a show
Bu hezuo de fangshi, Official Title: “Uncooperative Approach”
1995 in Shanghai, the informal English title was “Fuck You!”
One of the prison guard’s paintings was shown at that Expo
It showed a convict locked in an isolation cage
As guard he had to check the hot box hourly
Saw the man masturbating again and again
With electric brushstrokes caught the man’s caged wildness
Of course that painting wasn’t shown on TV
But the TV interview brought him national exposure
Which was seen by you, the mysterious recluse
You thought long and hard about it
You wrote a letter to the prison guard
Admired his love of the rawest human material
You two started an epistolary friendship
He took two weeks of vacation time
Went to Beijing and courted you
In time you went south to be his wife
You arrived at the staff residence compound
Brought along a truckload of books
You learned to fit in as a prison guard’s wife
Visited the sick ones, played mahjong sometimes
Kept up your habit of late-night reading
When his father in the old village had a stroke
You stayed for weeks to care for the ailing man
Each year you went to help in the cold season
Several years as a prison guard’s wife
Then he was hired by an art academy
Only burning idealism could live on that salary!
Your husband bragged about you in the salons
Somebody knew that you knew a thing or two
They paid you to write plans for a technology museum!
But I never met anyone as quixotic as you
You used to spin a dream of land rehabilitation
Wanted people to adopt pieces of scarred land
Reward them with shares in good land
Make an eco-region where minorities could come
At dinner I heard developers laugh at your proposal
But the two of you made me welcome in a new city
Right away I could talk with both of you
I went to your husband’s canvas-heaped studio
Those were great hours spent drinking coarse tea
With your frequent guest who is a great poet
And I used to take walks with you, Gothette
You read my absurd unpublished papers
I could see my thoughts mattered to someone
Before I left, I shared a last meal with you
You were even paler than before,
You got lymphitis from staying in that village house
Helping your in-laws during the cold season
In sympathy I touched swollen glands in your neck
That was the only time I ever touched you
But I still keep the agate pendant you gave me
You wanted me to remember your concern
I want to get back to writing
Write down ideas to entertain you
At least I owe you this poem
*** ** ***
ANSWER FOR A WINDOW-GAZER
After noticing signs of a habit put aside
I posed a question to myself—a window gazer
The question stayed in my rough-draft notebook
A year or two later, I wrote it as a poem
My daughter who is favored by the muses
And is the best reader a father could ask for
Read my “Question for a Window Gazer”
Then she looked up in surprise and said,
“Dad, I heard a conversation in a coffee shop
I think it had something to do with your poem!”
One day my daughter sat in that independent café
Once mentioned in the New York Times
As one of those “third places” in our city
A space for neighborhood and community
And rival to the sign of the “Green Mermaid®”
Two ladies met and sat at the neighboring table
One removed a cap, let down her long chestnut curls
Looked straight at her friend and spoke for a long time:
“Thank you for meeting me here, this is a sad day
In a few minutes I’ll go to my husband’s shop nearby
Today I will begin my first course of chemotherapy
He wants to be the one to cut my hair
He doesn’t want to see it fall out in patches.”
My daughter did not eavesdrop on purpose
But this story was delivered to her sympathetic ear
It tells me how someone’s dream was interrupted
We hold onto dreams by filaments as fine as hairs
When it comes time for wielding scissor blades
May we never turn them against anyone else
May we take care of our own
DENIS MAIR
Denis Mair holds an M.A. in Chinese from Ohio State University and has taught at University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a research fellow at Hanching Academy, Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan. He translated autobiographies by the philosopher Feng Youlan (Hawaii University Press) and the Buddhist monk Shih Chen-hua (SUNY Press). His translation of art criticism by Zhu Zhu was published by Hunan Fine Arts Press (2009). He has translated poetry by Yan Li, Mai Cheng, Meng Lang, Luo Ying, Jidi Majia, Yang Ke, and others. He also translated essays by design critic Tang Keyang and art historian Lü Peng for exhibitions they curated respectively in 2009 and 2011 at the Venice Biennial. (See Lü Peng, From San Servolo to Amalfi, Charta Books, Milan, 2011).
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A Dozen Nothing 