Sima Xiangru Rewrites Da-Ren Poem by Desmond Kon

The Yellow Emperor has asked for Da-Ren. Da-Ren arrives
and looks at the yellow all around; even the small teacups
have lost their chestnut and clove-tree cities to become one
unremitting saffron. No one is levitating in this courtyard
although they all want to. Da-Ren’s student has taken to
the merchant’s graphologist; they intend to open a tavern together
to palm-read and work in nanolithography and serve hot rice
wine and linseed oil in petri dishes. “I’ve lost or left my wife
and limestone children, ” the Yellow Emperor tells Da-Ren,
pushing green tea towards him, the tea thinking of the Hudson.
I feel like an orphan in my rented room in Catskills.
They say boiled dandelion roots are good for headaches,
now that Da-Ren has disappeared into the fresco, inveterate.



Author's Note:

This poem's earlier version stood within a chapbook sequence chosen by Mary Jo Bang as one of six finalists in the Noemi Press Poetry Chapbook Award. The poem was the premise of an artist's book bag created by fashion designer Kelly Tang of I WANT THAT!

As a precedent for how poetry and Buddhism remain fully compatible in both theory and practice, William R. LaFleur identifies Po Chü-i (772-846) , the Chinese poet better known to the Japanese as Hakurakuten. Accessible and thus popular because of the “comparative simplicity and directness of his verse”, LaFleur states that Po Chü-i was also “seen as something of a paragon for having worked out a rapprochement between that part of him which was a Buddhist and that part which was a poet”. LaFleur goes on to explain in his book, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley, California: University of California Press,1986) , saying:

“Late in his life, during the year 839, Po Chü-i gave a copy of his poetry to a Buddhist library. His written explanation referred to his poems as nothing more than 'floating phrases and fictive utterances' ('k’uang-yen i-yu') but expressed the hope that even as such they might in the future somehow bring honor to the Buddhist dharma. For many Japanese this phrase, which they rendered as 'kyõgen kigo' or 'kyõgen kigyo, ' and the hope that even such ephemeral utterances might serve the Buddhist dharma, were important, and the phrase became much celebrated. Since Po had found a way to reconcile the writing of verse with the practice of Buddhist disciplines, the Japanese poets of the medieval period were much encouraged. The phrase and its implicit suggestion that the problem had been or could be resolved reverberated down the centuries for those Japanese who wished to retain the best of both poetry and Buddhism. It was their way of reconciling the 'Way of poetry' (kadõ) with the 'Way of Buddhism' (butsudõ) .”