Living in One’s Own World

“You just go on living in your own world！”

With these words, a door slams shut in a distant wood.

The fire flickers for a moment,

a thoughtful face brightening and dimming.

With these words, the planet quickly splits into many more.

On one side lies a desolate sea,

on the other, a barren desert.

Quadrilateral light rises in the night sky,

compressed by an inner reflux,

shifting among several possibilities.

Streets keep branching out from where he stands,

branching more and more

past every monument they meet.

Night falls like a curtain around his feet,

he is a statue waiting to be unveiled,

magma glowing inside him.

Refuse to Wake

In the south of the Yangtze in March, grass grows and warblers fly,

yet I still feel no warmth.

My heart remains like a block of chemically infused ice,

I have tried every means to thaw it,

all in vain, wine no longer ignites passion.

I have nothing to say to anyone, save for teaching

and going to the cafeteria. I lock myself away indoors,

drawing all curtains to block the unkind light.

I know the outside world is still the same outside.

Nature runs by a cruel law—

no mercy, no love, only mutual devouring.

A magpie pecks a soft thing on the lawn,

flies up to the bare branches of a parasol tree, 

its tail vibrating to keep balance. 

All things kill one another to survive, 

The universe drifts toward heat death.

I hurry to read on the south balcony while daylight lasts,

I read only books written by saints—

they murmur in deserts, on pillars, or in caves,

words no one can make out,

yet I possess endless patience for this.

Sunlight occasionally illuminates a fragile sentence,

like a spotlight framing an actor fainting in slow motion.

My longing for spiritual experience overwhelms all other needs,

yet those words and logics still bring no warmth,

sunlight reveals more dust.

I believe there is One who governs human history,

I believe local evil may be global good,

I believe when I turn the final page of the book,

something unprecedented will happen.

Yet my heart still tightens. I refuse to wake

to the still heavy reality.

I have spent my whole life in escape.

Late Night in Early March

Deep into the night of early spring,

darkness and spring water flow down the southern slopes of Purple Mountain,

only silent cars occasionally glide past on the street.

I carry Whitman’s heavy Moments of the Soul,

and a bottle of hometown liquor long out of production.

A full decade has passed,

and eight years since you journeyed north to the capital.

Everything has changed, yet nothing seems to have changed at all,

haggardness lingers, unhidden by white hair and night,

two crabs raise their claws and touch,

they will cross the vast starry sky, one after another.

Ancient Town of Tongli, our wandering with two kitchen knives,

Yancheng in Changzhou, frogs croaking amid our rain filling shoes,

the golden glow of rapeseed blooms hides in remote mountains,

the moon and fireflies of Linggu Temple—

I have never seen them again since that day.

This is not our hometown after all,

but where on earth can we call home?

At a small Hot Pot inn, only the two of us remain,

bright lights hang empty, midnight has long passed,

I feel uneasy, time and again, for the inn owner’s toil.

One more drink, brother,

those scattered lights of our conversation

are a silence growing deeper in the dead of night—

concerning faith, like the faint chill of early spring nipping at my shoulders,

ten years ago I came here, at the very age you are now.

Nothing has changed, the earth turns gently,

I watch the taxi’s red taillights flicker and fade away,

a cool wind brushes my fevered forehead,

I stand long on the empty street,

Staring up at the bare treetops of plane trees 

rising higher and higher against the stars.

Evening at Longhill Lake

Wooden villas, sounds crystallized with fragrance,

abstract murals pieced from small blocks of wood.

Lake before, hills behind—

wild expanse, high sky.

Here one may drink and sing aloud,

or keep silence with the wilderness.

The sun sinks west;

a soft breeze drifts like a ship’s wake.

Heaven and earth seem to wait

for a solemn rite to begin.

I need not speak, nor think at all—

abide in a happy, plant-like state:

swaying with the wind, yet still in time.

Twilight falls quietly like a fishing net,

autumn crickets chirp,

dried cow dung glows with its last light,

like pale yellow window paper

soaked soft into pulp,

breathing the scent of paste and raw flour.

The Final Room

You write poems in your final room,

I translate poems in mine,

between us lies the silence of a whole continent,

and a gray, early winter.

You look up now and then toward the far shore,

shadows of trees, an overturned boat,

the deep-yellow roof of a temple,

gradually, you lose track of which afternoon it is—

much as my writing hand moves slower.

Has your Keatsian unease and the fog-shrouded plain,

vanished for a moment? As I set down these lines—

no man is an island, entire of itself or sufficient alone,

as I hesitate between two versions.

By now you must have finished that afternoon poem,

rising, you step onto the balcony to smoke,

glance back at the emptied room,

then gaze long at the wrinkled surface of the lake.

When I pause my work, twilight floods the window

like crowds of murmuring ghosts,

scattering and hiding in rooms that recede one by one,

turn on the light, brother—we are far apart.

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 10 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell Williams, Ashbery and Rosanna Warren. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies.