A Pond of Lotuses

A traditional Chinese image of lotuses: "Out of dirty mud, yet not sullied by it."

Look, those lotuses in blossom,
how they put up their show in grace,
women in love with their hearts wide open.
Look, those round leaves surround their queens,
a green smile spreading with secrets.
Look, those fishes and turtles underneath,
in the wood of lotus stems rooted in mud,
they play hide-and-seek.

X. Z. Shao
Copyright ©2003 X. Z. Shao

Moon waxes and wanes

By X. Z. Shao

 

Moon waxes and wanes

veiled and unveiled by clouds.
Surfaces of earth shift around,
which in a Chinese idiom:
The sea has turned into mulberry fields.
An insect born in the morning
may die in the evening.
The polar star may moves
and constellations may turn.
Change, change,
to everything seemingly fixed
to things there for you to grasp
to things already “yours”.
A movie ends with a city
shaking on the horizon of the sea,
like a mirage in the Taklimakan,
while on it a little urn of human ash
drifting up and down.
You may have your fair share
of impermanence,
yet you tend to suppress it
as you hide a skeleton, the Death,
in your closet,
but you often hear
its dangling in your dreams,
or even in your moment of ecstasy,
which you fans away as a gadfly.
How about be plain with it,
open your all senses
to the autumn leaves
yellowing and falling,
to lavas spewed up by a volcano,
to buildings bulldozed down and rebuilt,
to tides fluxes and ebbs,
to winds move around you,
to the furniture and books
and your cozy nest,
which you take for real,
but their every elements
like those in your body
are getting older every second
towards their final falling apart,
and to your old photos,
to people around you,
how a friend’s face changes
in a space of a few years,
how many go, how many come.
To hold and look at the face
of Impermanence,
to be aware of Time and Death,
is not a joy-killer
to your happy-go-lucky way,
it is a dance with changes
you need to learn,
is a mindset of letting-go
is a process of desolution
to be in tune with everything,
so that Time and Death
will have nothing to do
when they find out
you have already danced,
as they come to force your learn,
out of a tough love of caring ones.

            2015/5/21

A feather in the wind

By X. Z. Shao

 

A feather in the wind

going up and down
here and there
at the end of Forrest Gump,
if you can drive home
that message,
and live accordingly,
without any pretending,
without a conscious trying,
without a slight awareness
of your being imitating it,
you will be able to know
yearnings of all hearts,
languages of all beings
animate or not,
and wonders of all objects,
from burning sun
to the dust under your feet.

          2015/5/20

你幽閉在濕地小丘

By X. Z. Shao

 

你幽閉在濕地小丘

不能涉足你聽聞的瀛洲
你在朦朧恍惚的水裏捕魚
常常撈起了又滑去
驚喜緊接著無奈的微笑
水草裏魚兒形態迥異
還有各類青蛙和烏龜
時而有水蛇滑行在水面
沼澤上空盤旋著水鳥
還有群猴直立涉水而過
你的魚簍裝滿了古怪水族
夜晚歸來，你對月出神
你不醉酒，可你時常夢裏神遊

               Oct. 20 and 22 morning, 2007

An Ode to Chinese

The only language river flows nonstop from extreme antiquity to modern days.

By X. Z. Shao  

To translate

a traditional Chinese poem
into any other language
is to smear it,
to reduce a swan into a duck.
If you care about
how my ancients did
their language acrobats,
come,
I will show you
how each character
find its way from the wild
to a turtle or a bison bone,
to a cast bronze,
to a bamboo or a wooden slip
then to a piece of silk or paper,
its forms, from crude cuts
traced back four millennia plus,
to the script of Chin
with smooth lines
dancing like court girls
unfurling their long sleeves,
to Han’s official style
of willowy charm,
not to mention the regular script
with strength and pride
on which modern print Chinese bases,
and to the cursive style,
to give you a hint of its power,
Jackson Pollack may know a little.
With image characters
combined with vivid verbs
without much use of pronouns,
with prepositions out the picture,
adverbs and adjectives’ functions
derived from picturesque nouns,
never with such things as
definite and indefinite articles, 
singular, plural and tenses,
a cluster of a few lines
will give you the wonder
of Milton’s lofty mind,
Shakespeare’s skill to enslave words,
and a Romanticist being tortured
by the Beauty and his mental storms.
In Li Bai,
you will experience
the sky and earth linked
via the mountains he trekked.
you will see flowers, birds,
clouds, rivers, the sun and moon…
explode into wonders and his lament,
and his voice can be so fine tuned,
his negative capacity is such
that he imagines himself
to be his wife answering his own letter,
which makes you swooned by the tender love,
and his sympathy to a court beauty’s
marriage to a nomadic tribal head
perpetuates her sorrow
that cuts and bites deep into your flesh.
And his is only the extreme tip of an iceberg,
literally, of the whole body of Chinese verses.  
Don’t expect narrative scenes
similar to Homeric wars,
or a long discursive rendering,
for how you can
set your wildest horse run
forever on earth and in the sky
without its slacking or dropping dead.
To Chinese eyes,
lines without imageries are unpoetic.
We have only lyrics
that make your heart strings coil and loose,
and you are forced to bounce,
and find it hard to keep your hands still. 

         2015/5/19 

In one go, I bought a few books,

By X. Z. Shao

In one go, I bought a few books,
among them, a book of  

floral drawings and paintings
by a French court painter
or someone else,
I don’t even remember.
I took a casual turning of the pages
with my heart jumping
and my breath quickening for its beauty,
then put it aside
as a delicacy for my future eyes.
Yesterday, a few months later,
I thought about it,
but it was nowhere to be found.
Rummaging all shelves,
going through book by book,
once, twice, thrice,
sure, I would be crazy without it.
As the evening mealtime
of the canteen drew near to close
and I couldn’t eat books
that filled up my kitchen,
I was totally defeated.
To get out of the abyss,
I filled up my belly
and took a usual evening walk.
Today, I resumed the stupid search again
and almost missed my noon meal.
A little irritation,
a little heartache,
I don’t know how many times
It will gnaw my heart
as a distant loss of love.

               2015/5/19

In this no-man zone

By X. Z. Shao
Any comment, contact: xzshao@hotmail.com

              Would that I were a reed trodden under foot,
              For that were better than to be a lyre of silvery strings
              In a house whose lord has no fingers
              And whose children are deaf.
                                          — Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of the Prophet 

In this no-man zone
of once a stranger’s tongue,
an invisible island of Crusoe,
among my fellow countrymen,
I am the sole monarch
ruling supreme, and the only subject
catering to his ruler’s every whim.

In perpetual solitude,

I make soliloquies,
think aloud and write in a language
none other than yours,
a voiceless zone, it seems,  
but with Ariel’s tricks constantly in the wind.

I was born, live and survive

in this ancient land
with her unique writing kit
and enchanting words
which make me prostrate
in awe to their aching charm and glamour.
They are milk to the lucky me
incarnated here to sate
an endless longing in the wind.

I thought I would be one among them
with mountains to trek,
rivers to wade and to course,
hearing monkeys’ screams
and looking at the clouds
capping the top of a steep bank
where the fairy Queen is said
to have met her worldly counterpart
in secret plays of love,
but I am not.

I survive in reveling

with their souls wrapped up in words,
dancing in the moonshine
beaming to me from the old,
their lore and tales,
the very air sustaining me wherever I am.

My contemporaries

are recovering from a collective madness
inspired by the Lord of Delusion.
Their hands are still dusty
in temple destructions,
in removing heads from Buddha’s statues,
Their habits of vandalization
still sometimes return them to the old deed.
Despite they are being caught red-handed,
they are unaware of their guilt and shame.

I can’t speak to them,

theirs is a version of simplified
and contaminated language
made coarse by the north wind
and trivialized by their caged life
plus the swelling up pride of the newly-rich
who gossip in buzzwords
which make your skin pop up
gooseflesh when heard.

In tune with the ancient,

in peace the modern
in an invisible secluded zone,
I gradually pick up your tongue, now mine.
Traversing far and wide,
it seems I were thousands of years old,
yet, still young, still a baby
acquiring a new tongue.
I know what everyone talks,
yet, I am among none of them.

This margin, an isle, a new planet,

or a similar shady zone of Dante’s purgatory
where ancient men of letter converge,
has its first frontier settler.
Maybe Sappho will come with her lyre,
Keats with a sanguine smile,
Tai Qian with his brew for years,
Li Bai with a sword and a gourd,
Rumi whirling with one palm up, one down,
Baudelaire with his mask off,
and my friend, Dana Wilde of Maine,
is already a frequenter before them all,
and the list will go on and on…  
until my place becomes a carousal of songs.

               2015/5/17