then    we turn our backs to the symbols

sit into    another river
a dark blue corner of a dark blue room

when hearing is blacker    ten years the jetty has leaned whispering against water
in the little park     ten years the tender green accordion of trees has played
children charging down the April to April steps

clouds charging down their reflection    water now bright now dark
and squirrel’s pulped organs open
a blood-red photo album     reality stings even through glass
even a soaked hand couldn’t touch the lined-up days

river     a blank textbook hanging from the past window
questioning now only the single remaining page     no need to learn vagrancy
weariness     tethered to a water bird flying low
the spinning whirlpool     exit for all the world’s skyscrapers
flee     flee to plastic flowers     no need to learn vanishing

Hudson just like a name formed by the sound of the wind
lamplight’s passing glance     just like ghost fire hidden in human bodies
switched on     just like a notch blown away at will
a rosy notch twilight recorded on the sky
whoever has understood it     will live into a poem
unending past events

room in a room     filled with water of a decade
corner in a corner     painting the dark blue of distance
the way we sit forever turning our backs on the ocean
listening to the waves shatter     rubble savagely smashing a decade
telephone lines broken     cries for help blindly float through a decade
river the colour of forgetting     can’t forget
each day     two hands full of crimson steel tumbling straight down

no need to learn burning     handful of ash fixed in
tight-shut eyes     moon like a scooped-out pip
singing contralto     requiem for every river valley
every place that flows away appears each time after dying
banks paved underfoot     have been thousands of times removed
a pale fishbone always has another end glowing with phosphorescent light
endurance     to slap a lifetime’s final
farewell     pushing out tonight again

with the look of a room thrust into the universe
survey how much this sunken ship could further sink
our backs turned to zero drawn as the horizon
how much farther it migrates     then crazy blue is blue enough to be black
in a lost accent     Hudson pressed against
a bluestone wellhead buried at the gate of an ancient Chinese village
destruction touches its own diameter of one day
one drop     gathers snow left for us
with the beauty of survivors and the cruelty of survivors

 

 

 

Translated from the Chinese by Brian Holton.

YANG LIAN grew up in Beijing and Tianjin. He left China in 1983 and finally settled in London. A bilingual edition of his collection, Where the Sea Stands Still (Bloodaxe, 1999), translated by Brian Holton, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Acknowledgement is due to Ruth Borthwick, Head of Literature & Talks at the Royal Festival Hall, who commissioned this poem for Lorca’s ‘Poet in New York’ gala for the 2002 Poetry International.

Author’s note:
This poem is part of What Water Confirms, a long poem based on Lee Valley in London, which became my international “new neighbourhood” in 1997, when I came to live nearby.

©Copyright of this poem remains with the poet: please do not download or republish without permission.

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