from Night Water
Poems by Po Kuan
Po Kuan (circa 420-485 C.E.) was, like many Chinese poets of his age and afterwards,
a provincial bureaucrat at the mercy of the political winds – the circumstances of his exile,
when he was approximately thirty years old, remain mysterious. Po’s uniqueness lay
in how itinerant his exile was. He seems to have followed the Silk Road almost from end to end:
he made an extended stay in Pataliputra, visited Bactra, Samarkand and Ctesiphon, and there
is evidence that he reached the edges of the Byzantine Empire in present-day Turkey. As far as
we know, Po did not title his poems. Some of the following pieces are most likely fragmentary.
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Sitting under the tree sitting
under the tree nightfall
sitting under the tree
The wind doesn't happen often here.
More seldom than any place I know.
This makes the flowers
and branches inert. (It’s strange
they have survived.)
Rain holds off forever,
then comes from nowhere, at night,
like fever sweat. (Awakened,
the world ponders its predicaments.)
It's hard to read
because the books were all written
back when things were real
A single strand of spiderweb
in moonlight between
the tree’s highest branches.
Night’s water has broken,
something’s about to be born.
There was a brokenspined silent child
her father trundled into the winehouse
they all said
Look at how long her eyelashes are
Bitter to live in
this poet's or that one's
marble crèche on the hill
they drank the weight
of the world one night
now can't stop pissing
best live with me
in my room under the bridge
late yesterday I proved
my theory about the sun
challenged him
said let's take this outside
and he just bolted away.
There is a stone outside the city here
balanced on another stone,
delicately, it appears, but
if you lean against it you know
fifty strong men couldn’t push it down.
They say this stone is where
God used to live, and three or four
of them always squat at its base
praying for it to fall on them.
At odd hours anger rises up,
and I am surrounded by fools.
They sleep standing up
like horses. They groom
their boorishness like hair,
they oil it. They
will be in my way
even after we are all dead.
Anger rises up,
not always accompanied by wine.
This city shoves the desert
up on its side
and climbs inside it to live.
Every day every night
seeking out something
midway between
sunlight moonlight
My foot fell asleep
and my mind envied
At home
magnolia blossoms the first storm
of summer tore from the trees.
They filled the streets,
a flock of white birds
migrating East. Till only
one was left: burnt orange,
scentless, split
along its length, curled round
itself like the beginning of a fist.
She was so beautiful
when anyone saw her
they would stop a moment
and then resume their business
a little bewildered and sad.
When I was with her
it was like being the man inside
the great fish. Which is no insult.
He was happy there: it was
warm, not too unpleasantly damp,
and he had no responsibilities.
My old teacher is
at the cemetery writing
This is shit!
and Who wrote this?
on the tombstones.
To put out my right eye
so as to give up forever
the ambition of seeing you
from all sides at once
I am coming through a time
when I was not alive,
and then was alive only
from the outside of the body
inward: living in someone
else’s skin
in addition to my own.
I breathe out in
the cold to keep
palpably before my eyes
the veil between
myself and the world
They see their own faces
in the spittle of god.
In fact, dozens of gods, petty landlords
of dozens of little fiefdoms:
thunder, sex, killing for food,
the dance. And the same
angel always trying to enter
the same kingdom.
God crawling on his belly
to the edge of the river.
God of the wind coming up
at sunset. God of the gracious
ignorance of others’ foolishness.
God of the love of the potter
for the vase, so much so
he cannot take it to market.
In the morning, when I
went out to see what damage
the storm had caused,
I found it hadn't even rained
Her heart is
without flaw and
without immediate intention.
As he walks towards nowhere
he sees a plume of smoke
out of the corner of his eye.
On the great plain
I saw cities I didn’t understand
cities made from clay
and oxbone
temples like mounds
of curdled milk
heat like flies
touching the skin in many places
shivered away
coming back again.
I am the little god of my body,
old paintbrush never properly cleaned,
soaked through with the eternal
illusion of sex:
to go into you to go through
to someplace else no one
has ever been, and every dawn unlearn it.
When I don't sleep
the world becomes
a gel under my feet
a bridle in my teeth
One dawn outside Patna
a spider had woven
astride the wheel.
Thin spokes of the web
between those thicker.
It was gone, that spider.
The cart moved, the web turned
flecked with dawnwater.
Having been spun
by what was gone, it turned;
droplets moved inward
and outward moving West.
I was called away for a time;
day rose; it was gone.
Year grows longer
day grows shorter
life grows longer
death grows shorter
Brought to the court
the dog shat and bit
brought to heel
the man said he thrived
I am apprehensive like
the man chipping away
ice from his teeth
Looking at an old book
of poems, can't remember
who's dead and who's not.
The little aureole
of the grape just starting
to turn brown.
Who said regrets must be set aside?
Who could do that? Each
regret must be particularized,
parceled out syllable by syllable,
eyelash by eyelash,
sifted, atomized into the mist
that surrounds us, the veil
that loves us, that we must not love.
In poetry as in love
it is good when it works
but the moment before it starts working --
that is the time you would stretch out
forever if you could.
I follow the horizon
from blue to green,
known to unknown.
I understand the sky,
barely. I have
been in the sky.
Rain, for the first time in a month.
The great fire to the south
drowned away. In the wind
the trees all nod slightly,
again and again, like upset
children finally falling asleep.
Paper rubs itself
along the ground, dark
seas coalesce, under
the trees the wet world sails.
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