The Feeling of Things Coming to an End

I like the feeling of things coming to an end

a book finished, good or bad;

a rain falling is all the rain falling;

the campus near vacation starts to empty,

and plane trees and metasequoias have shed all their leaves.

Despair is the same thing happening over and over,

the same days like a white noose

slipping around your neck, then loosening.

You go out, hoping to bring back a different version of yourself,

but what comes back is still that same lifeless face.

Nothing ever truly ends—

they only vanish, not perish,

they still exist beyond your field of vision.

Nor do things ever truly happen—

they are feints, meaningless gestures,

irregularly shaped clutter, piled in a cold, empty backstage.

You want to move to another room to live,

but the part of you that can’t die is always in another

identical room, sitting there in the dark,

staying up all night, not speaking,

waiting for you to enter, to see him, 

and facing each other in silence.

Black River

The deep black river seems to have stopped flowing

within it lie inverted palaces

it never freezes, even in winter

on its snow-white banks, 

no footprints of man or beast dare approach its silence

this is the finest way, leading to other silences

and oblivion

The Last Moment

— Written on the Day of Completing the Translation of Helen Vendler’s Poetic Essays

A page rustles, for a little while

like a face in the desert hesitating

then melting away

a man steps onto another path in the woods

A murder without a target is perfect

as a stranger in native clothes

holding a key or a sword

crushed berries smearing the stones

The universe falls silent again

as if waiting for his decision

whether it is still time to choose to vanish

in the white steam trailing the summer mountaintop

to listen once more to the echo of nobody

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 is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese.

He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 including nine 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. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) composed of 1178 poems celebrating 40 years of writing poetry.