Xiao Kaiyu Poems

A mountain top? A house? A person?
please don't breathe out again
please don't put today to sleep
please don't force it out, don't
please don't open your mouth
please don't believe in the buoyancy of air


and let down a first well-meaning desire
let down a hand held out
a dazzling face
an intoxicating waist
a morning light held close too long
a silently burning scruple


My damp body has already reached noon
my luke-warm heart is already in middle years
I watch the mist scatter into a feeble sunlight
I pass through a thicket of statues
open a book from which almost all type-face has fled
encourage a very small dream
...

Wildflowers in full bloom float on the black
sandpaper of this night, white ones, yellow ones,
swaying to the sweep of the incoming murk.

They sway in a radiant and lucent landscape
with birds gathered in dreary evening council.
Ah, the playing of an Er-hu pierces the ink painting.

Just the sort of requiem to rouse her, so she'd
rise from the oppression of wildflowers, rise,
and reclaim the space occupied by amnesia.

Rhetoric has replaced a living room crammed with mouths.
Hunger skills have replaced a kitchen stacked with cookbooks.
Lessons in ethics have replaced a bedroom strewn with underwear.

With a renewed and generous solemnity, she
appears to loom near the leafy and shifting
hedge. Did her face betray a tormented smile?

The moisture underneath is the earth sweating,
the wildflower roots wriggle deep into earth's bones, maggots
crawling up to devour the last bit of fortitude I relied upon.

On the surface, the dead persist in sacrificing themselves.
In fact, it is the living who die yet again.
A glorious transformation of the system.

Please return to the frigid sweat of the hillside,
amid the slackened self-control of the unconscious,
where instead you can make judgments and not just muddle on.
...

To shave away all the color and style of bureaucratic red tape,
to make the great person of accurate contents
show preference for silvery gray—the color of clouds—and indigo—
the color of sea
—to project a prim appearance
of grand manner. He likes this kind of country.

The badge of the sun is fastened to his forehead,
dangling over a sea of people.
The vast reality, forged steel right out of the cauldron,
builds the hazy square, infinity interlaced with finitude,
around the ramparts and tower
of purple gold, but in fact they are made of clay.

Newspapers cheer the ideal victory,
the tidewater rises lawlessly,
millions of heartfelt hurricanes provoke banners to flutter.
Waves of boat masts lead the seawater to rise,
the sea is only boat hulls and the sea bottom.

He sleeps in a swimming pool filled with ancient texts,
a renovated workshop, looking into the air,
speaking short incomprehensible sentences.
Unfathomable ideas are concealed in stiff reeds of utterance,
The soldier's language comes from an imperceptible battlefield, but who can
understand it?
...

The slanting grassy slope had the tone of a lamb,
free, bright, melodious as a brass instrument.
I was there in silent meditation, under the three-foot high rocky shore,
the crystalline stream, flowing among the carp.

A herdboy led along a water buffalo, sometimes an ox.
Before the good grass, the beasts were rapacious and gentle.
The grass once eaten grew back even lusher than before.
He was thinking of happy things but singing The Tune of the Mulberry.

A girl came walking toward me with fruit and flower seeds
in both arms, a young landlord following behind.
We played some simple games to make him happy
and teach him a little. He would rather be catching butterflies.

Suddenly, fishing birds flew up and landed at her feet,
grappling for food; it was a shock to me.
In a book about original sin, I read of the measure
of beauty, the only Helen in the realm.

Ah, summer, with the corn stretching down the riverbank,
where did the resplendent woman and river full of children
run off to hide? The autumn wind came on with a vengeance,
the river instantly turned cold, the willows wizened and died.

Air penetrates one's flesh and like a sparkling paring knife
Shaves the burden from my body.
How light must one's thoughts become in order to fly?
I reclined, polishing a pebble in my palm.
...

A mountain top? A house? A person?

please don't breathe out again

please don't put today to sleep

please don't force it out, don't

please don't open your mouth

please don't believe in the buoyancy of air


and let down a first well-meaning desire

let down a hand held out

a dazzling face

an intoxicating waist

a morning light kept secret too long

a silently burning scruple


My damp body has already reached noon

my lukewarm heart is already in middle years

I watch the mist scatter into a feeble sunlight

I pass through a thicket of statues

open a book from which almost all type-face has fled

encourage a very small dream
...

A morning of a candle

a morning of a ball of snow

rolling, an explosion, a conspirator and his mother-in-law

a morning of an overwhelming defeat


A morning of talk

a morning of imperative statements, of orders

and inceptive language

a morning of the megaphone


A morning of milk, eggs and contemplation

a morning of class struggle


A morning of the movement of limbs

a morning of sunlight, a morning

of lungs and surface appearances

a morning of a vehicle

moving, hauling a husband away
...

One day, in a primary school room

I learned this noun.

That evening I saw its black wings

unfold from the sky, like a parachute

fall with a feeling of hovering,

covering the bodies of me and my little sister.

Ai, from under the walnut tree in the yard my little sister

hesitantly walked into her bedroom,

into the maw of a huge blackbird.

Later in a different land, among the ruins of an old building

on the wall of my heart I saw a flock of them

suddenly fly up like a premonition of death

like a black cloud, and thought of my little sister.

She got married to a man,

on the home village's short, one-and-only street,

in a grocery shop.
...

In the grey haze of evening the buildings of Lujiazui

hang costly heads.

The chair-shaped hall of the People's Bank

has pock-faced guards to forbid the entrance of our ilk.

We are not bankers and banker's kin,

we are not figures this bank wants to reckon.

We are just people, men and women,

in a fog but a body of joy.


The mother bank assiduously sits upright,

old and influential, swallowing strings of numbers.

O, those numbers are all astonishing,

most are the bitter flavor of a rhizome root,

a few the meteoric yellow hallucinations of cocaine.

Too many of them come from multiplication,

they pile up savagely, yet timidly,

toward a friendly, thoroughgoing bout of diarrhea.


Those afraid of the people's numbers

mount a dais, and from the meeting go to the bank.

I've said I'm a poet of the proletariat,

but am keen on strolling on the waterfront and in Lujiazui.

This riddle is like high-voltage going through a chair

subjugating a similar neural net, the spoils of war

are the silence in the aftermath.

Less than yet more than the people.
...

Today, as I had hoped, at four in the afternoon

reclining on a bench in Zhongshan park, I fell

deep asleep. Waking, I feel something's missing.


It is not in the women practicing warlike boxing,

or the bodies of the children playing football, but in me,

in that pleasing intermission as I slept by a lawn,


Some things vanished. In the belly of a pregnant woman,

the striking of a ball, the sound of cicadas, and the drone of an airplane

flying over the park I hear ever more pauses.


I once thought the sky is a bank

will lose its riches, its windstorms, its

emptiness; but me, I have nothing to offer up to be lost.


All I've ever had, in the time I can see,

is not mine. All I've ever had, in the time I speak,

has already vanished; without form, without quality.


I even know what disorders the clothing of weeping relatives at a funeral

is not the breath of the dead,

and remorse. Ooh, it isn't.
...

I feel I'm a crowd of people.

On the overpass at the old Northern Station, in my body

some people start to discuss and argue, a cacophony.

I'm smoking, considering the ruins of a train station,

I want to shout, there's a burning in my throat.


I feel I'm a crowd of people.

Walking on an abandoned track, kicking the curling rust of ties,

O, it's unbearably crowded inside me, as if some people are getting on a train,

some off. A train is coming toward me,

another goes whistling out of my body.


I feel I'm a crowd of people.

I walk into a spacious room, pass over a railing,

at the ticket-check of bygone days, suddenly, within me

a void. O, in this waiting room there are no travelers,

what's standing or seated is all dim shadow.


I feel I'm a crowd of people.

In a nearby alley, at a cigarette stall, beside a phone box,

they come out like pearls of sweat. They squat, jump,

block things up in front of me. They wear watches, brocade shirts,

carry weighty trunks as if they're balloons.


I feel I'm a crowd of people.

While eating noodles in a noodle shop they are before me

sitting around the table. Their angular or square faces, laughing loudly, they have a

a bit of an accountant's

false respectability. But I'm extremely hungry. Humming an old movie tune,

they step into my bowl.


I feel I'm a crowd of people.

But they've gathered into a heap of fears. I get on a public bus,

the bus rocks. Enter a bar, the power goes out. So I must walk

to Hongkou, the waterfront, the square, go home in a round about way.

I sense there's another pair of feet in mine
...