Duo Duo | Reading

On Dementia Mountain

Facing rain, raindrops

And the drizzling boulder-like sky

A man leading a goat

Squats on the rock, a loneliness

Inside, the singular bleakness

Of great nature consoling humans

When the mine fades into a faint crack of thunder

A big fissure of early morning

Also has detected man

The pure weight in his silent shadow

The ancient town that has buried ancient ships ancient mirrors

Also has buried your home

How wonderful, the way ancient tombs face the scenery on the slopes

How wonderful, evil and its hunger are still very young…

White Sand Gate

A pool table faces ruined statues, nobody

A huge fishing net is mounted on the broken wall, nobody

A bicycle is locked to a stone column, nobody

The angels topping the column, three have been shot down, nobody

The sea of asphalt will soon surge here, nobody

There is still one horse on the beach, but nobody

As you stand there you become extraneous, nobody

Nobody, nobody takes guarding for a home—

En Route to Borges Bookstore

Bustling streets, your address

Is a city where waves flow by

Refusing only things that have passed

When these restaurants, teahouses, choose

Another crowd, another death, another…

Myth, never renews itself

Time, overflows a basin that seems

Familiar, teaching passers-by

To ignore the dirty water, but notice the sadness:

All entrances, are mistaken entrances

Apart from mistaken entrances, there are no entrances

The road sniffs these things out, and grows wider…

Think This Word        

This thinking, this unfulfillment

This meaning, this haunted mine

This force from the coal strata

Penetrates deep down into the blood strata within geologic strata

From the juncture from which man alone has been excluded

Only shake the left hand, only a hole remains

Think of this death, without knowing how to die

In the sand, spines buried upright

Construction site gravesite, all on their shoulders

Under the worker’s huts, death is over-exposed

The gravediggers are releasing their power

The past of the hole, cast into the faith of time

The center, precedes death

Events, surging in silence

At the built up site, in the newly built wilderness

History is borne, no one is there

In its safety

Our motives are absent

Gazing at it, through gazing

We are able to return partly

This, is the collective oath of wild grass at the outskirts of city

Grass—Source

Listen to the pain of copper in our voice

Leaving behind a shape like a valley

What in our life

Buries the golden ears of expansive listening

What walks out

Telling the weeping cliffs in a cruel world

What is man, why is man

Intervening in the wandering mountains and rivers…

Within It

Bury your words, and toss in

Your death                                                               

So tiny it’s no longer a seed

Living in a bowl

Not placid, but waveless

Man’s boundless expectations

Are thus lined up like tombstones 

Able to traverse an entire country…

Promise

I love, I love my shadow
Being a parrot, I love eating
What it loves eating, I love giving you what I don’t have
I love asking: Do you still love me?
I love your ear, and it loves listening: I love adventures

I love this enamored house inviting us to lie down and make its roof
I love lying on my side, casting a shadow for a straight line
Leaving a string of small villages for a voluptuous body
I want that birthmark closest to your lips
To know, this is my promise

I love the intelligence in my dreams being an ambitious groom

I love eating raw meat, gazing straight at hell
But more I love secretly playing the violin in your arms
I love turning off the lights early, waiting
For your body to illuminate this room once again

I love when I sleep, my pillow covered in plums
Waking up, the plums all have returned to their branches
I love all night long the waves attracting the front deck of the ship
I love shouting: You will come back
I love torturing the harbor, torturing words, in this way

I love controlling myself in front of the desk
I love thrusting my hands into the sea
I love my five fingers stretching open at the same time
Holding tightly the edges of a wheat field
I love my five fingers still being your five boyfriends

I love memory being a life, less
But still more than what has been left out when a woman
Walks toward me, as if thirty years ago
In the sunset, on the street, that girl carrying her violin case
Still smiling at me for no reason

I love even more that we are still a pair of torpedoes
Waiting for someone to launch us again
I love rejoining you in the depths of the sea, you
Are mine, only mine, I
Still love speaking like this, like this, singing of my promise—

I’m dreaming

Dreaming of my father, a cloud writing left-handed

With the thickness of the glass in a pharmacy 

He is wearing a blue raincoat

On a street once grooved by an old phonograph needle

Passing by a dye shop, a coffin store

Not far from that street I walked toward growing up

His blue bones are still calling for a trolley

I’m dreaming that on every street corner, I see the back of a father

Throwing himself into a fight among a crowd of fathers

Every street is resisting, every corner

Is a witness: right in the middle of the street

One father’s tongue was pulled out

Like pulling an inner tube out of a bicycle tire…

The time since the death of my father is all passing by at full speed

I wish someone could end this dream

Wish someone could wake me up

But no one does, I continue to dream    

Just as in a dream once dreamt by the dead

Dreaming their lives

Shovel after shovel of soil is poured into the open chests of men

In their bodies, through dreams, the earth is gaining new territories

A mass of flies that no longer eat human flesh

Has been hovering over that place for a long while

As soon as they see from afar the idly swaying hooks in a fish shop

They will all burst into tears…

I’ve accepted this dream

I’ve dreamt what I ought to have dreamt

I’ve dreamt the mandate of the dream

As if kidnapped by a dream—

Vermeer’s light

According to the proportion of Zen, a small scale

Weighs the dust in the light

And the weight of too heavy a meaning in the dust

Tiny exquisite pearls, upon

The touch of the golden-pupiled girl

Bring forth even tinier light

To extract numbers in this way, teach numbers

To learn the song – until how late, until how long

To arrive at Vermeer’s light

Never spoken, hence supreme beauty

Never spoken, hence supreme beauty

translated by Mai Mang (Yibing Huang)