Reading Poetry in a Cambridge Graveyard
Here lies a silence older than stone
the archaeology of roots digs layer by layer,
through the relics of different eras,
perhaps recovering pages turned blank once more,
seeking clues deeper than the underground river.
Probing fingers grope through one another’s darkness,
like long-lost kin, unexpectedly meeting in the late night.
There must be a half-green, half-red autumn here,
with heavy branches bending toward the lips of stone.
There must be bees of sunlight, building their hives
before the curve of frost seals tight.
There must be a shining horizon of poetry,
spreading out from the warm and deep collar.
Perhaps some poet, whose name has long worn away,
Listens, forgets he is straddling both worlds,
knowing everything, yet unable to speak.
His lips, heavier than marble,
puckered to a dry berry from the effort to move.
On Translation
Winter is a war of everyone against everyone,
while translation is a person milking cows in winter.
There are many cows in the pasture—patient, still, docile,
the hair on their necks stiffened by the cold.
You milk them, in the darkness of dawn;
the white milk writes the earth into italics,
you keep squeezing, until the milk is tinged with blood.
Why are you here? This is a cattle shed drafty on all sides,
hay mixes with ice, there are no colored lights here,
no rituals. Those quiet cows line up,
chewing cud, as their swollen and painful breasts
gradually turn into empty, sagging, icy sacks.
No portrait of a leader hangs high here,
only grains of salt mixed in the manure pile,
only the foam that splashes in the tin bucket at your feet—
fragrant, fleeting, and pleasing.
After Midnight
In those years, he always thought after midnight
about how to restart a world stuck in a loudspeaker
by then, everyone had fallen asleep, and the fire in the stove was dying down
the kitten’s purr coiled around an endless ball of yarn
cold constellations glimmered on the window lattice
yet his thinking was almost like not thinking at all
like a creature that neither grows old nor stays young
adorned with snowflakes on its shoulders, unborn still
a coin with only one side, its patterns blurred
so he went downstairs in the dark and wandered the empty streets
like someone feeling empty after making love
winter is the wreckage of a year, and he still tried to love it
Night Falls Again
He has uncovered the truth of eternal recurrence
on winter nights darkness still descends so swiftly, so precisely
a single strike of the dirty bomb, with its incalculable half-life
the moment he speaks its name, he is suddenly standing
in a dim, familiar circular hall
surrounded by a score of identical doors
he pushes one open and steps into a backyard
there a child is prodding a skull half-buried in the grass
making it glimmer faintly, like a thought that refuses to submit
he does not feel the stir of unease, he cannot hear
what the child is humming, perhaps an old song
he cannot kill him from behind, to end this once and for all
he knows their lives are both
pirated copies of a shoddy translation of the same novel
blurred at times, sharp at others, like a promise
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 9 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.
