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| Ma Yuanyu, Blue Gentiana and Red Lychnis (1690) |
These days I’m already sad before I get drunk and drunk I have no place to go.
I tug at my robe but it still won’t cover my shins.
They say immortals eat cloud-seed rice, which is shattered mica.
I thought of Wang Hsien-chi. When thieves broke into his house, he asked them not to take his tattered green rug.
*
An abandoned courtyard: an old tree:
A temple bell lying on its side:
The world I live in.
They win and we lose; we lose and they win.
Vines wrap around the rotting bones.
She knows he won’t come back from the army, but patches the clothes he left just in case.
*
In the street a woman is weeping.
A boy walks by whistling.
An officer changes his horse.
The clouds are brown and unmoving.
The wind picks up.
All things do what they do:
Birds swoop to catch an insect.
Moonlight breaks through the forest leaves.
Soldiers guard the border.
I am trapped in this body.
A boy walks by whistling.
An officer changes his horse.
The clouds are brown and unmoving.
The wind picks up.
All things do what they do:
Birds swoop to catch an insect.
Moonlight breaks through the forest leaves.
Soldiers guard the border.
I am trapped in this body.
*
Trees barely visible in the fog; only the sound of the garrison drums.
Impossible to know if the news is just rumor:
Officials, they say, are disguising themselves as fisherman and butchers.
Rebels ride the horses of ghosts.
Why do they always burn things down?
I thought of that Immortal who lived in a world inside a clay pot.
*
The world is damp and dry, damp or dry.
Two swallows suddenly came into my room.
They were raised in dust and wind.
It took them a long time to get here,
escaping the damp and dry of the world like me.
Two swallows suddenly came into my room.
They were raised in dust and wind.
It took them a long time to get here,
escaping the damp and dry of the world like me.
Eliot Weinberger (1949). From "The Life of Tu Fu". Chicago: Poetry Foundation.
