TWO POEMS BY YAU CHING
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| Peter Paul Rubens, "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" (1620) |
Après Genet
As I sit here in this stately country manor, my thoughts reach out to you. I write: The world is filled with all these things I do not want, whereas I am filled with you. In The Thief's Journal, Genet says, I had a simple elegance, the easy bearing of the hopeless. My courage consisted in destroying all the usual reasons for living and unearthing whole new ones. The discovery came slowly. Like Genet, I too have labored to find a reason for living, but in contrast to what so many believe I found mine not in love but in what love cannot accomplish. A longing laced with sweat and tears that spills across the tree tops and scatters on the plains to become fodder for the birds. The sheer waste and hopelessness of love. And yet this very hopelessness forces me to confront my life. It forces me to live. At times like this, when things begin to fall apart—the final rallying call at Waterloo, Hitler in his Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, the long-awaited hour when the glory and the grandeur that were Germany and England and France crumble into dust—one must feel a certain joyful release and lightness of being in which death itself seems ethereal as down. Xiang Yu, the hegemon-king whose strength could pull down mountains, turns to bid farewell to his beloved concubine and is felled by the knowledge that love cannot conquer all, that life and death and love and hatred are neither glorious nor grand. It is only at such moments that I can love even in the face of what love cannot accomplish; if the former makes me feel alive, the latter gives me reason for living.
The Temptations of Eden
We are orphans
we don't belong in Asia
we've never had neighbors friends or brothers
all our lives we've been chased by monsters
we're chronically oxygen deprived
we can't even take a deep breath
when the past became now
when the lost was found
the angels filled in the holes
threw us onto the rubble of the city's ruins and locked the gate
so we'd slaughter each other
so we'd despise each other and cling to each other
blast ourselves into the void
at the speed of the fastest maglev
past endless mountains and rivers waiting
to be taken over
yet again by neighboring regions
this is Eden
We are orphans
we don't belong in Asia
we've never had neighbors friends or brothers
all our lives we've been chased by monsters
we're chronically oxygen deprived
we can't even take a deep breath
when the past became now
when the lost was found
the angels filled in the holes
threw us onto the rubble of the city's ruins and locked the gate
so we'd slaughter each other
so we'd despise each other and cling to each other
blast ourselves into the void
at the speed of the fastest maglev
past endless mountains and rivers waiting
to be taken over
yet again by neighboring regions
this is Eden
Yau Ching. Five Poems - Yau Ching. Asymptote.
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