David Perry 

Translator

Steam arrives from the Western Paradise,
steam a hand drawing paper-cut clouds
aware of the people on the roadway: motion sick, a peasant woman
clutches her purse with nothing to show for half a lifetime of sweat and hard roads.

The Way is never far, the peasant woman and Matisse alike
love making papercuts from hungry chaos crosscutting bountiful calm and sticking them to
Heaven and Earth.

The weather report persuades the weather
to obey reality’s ideology: the red deer
obeys the maze of deer trails. Thundershowers
hurl plastic bags to earth back
of the transfer station, the new district resembling
half a box of leftover food, hissing exhalations
add vinegar and oil. The ideology of
rapid swelling: do away with datong, the Great Community,
ship off the old society and assemble the new and different.

Suburban fields, insomnia weather:
train rails pumping it out photocopiers
leaving no space to live, light sleep
often sometimes already occupied by plastic bags
swimming with people, shoving, pushing back, seizing ground.

The hermit heads into the city, compares himself to a wastepaper basket:
a camera obscura containing the unlucky, each and every fate suspended within.
Wastepaper insomnia, to copy datong
insomnia is to be unable to copy wu wei or perhaps even the Tongzhi Emperor.

Washed ashore in a plastic bag Buddha
sheds his swimsuit really
it’s just underwear: the elastic band’s bitten deep
into his fat impressing its mark: the old villages
the sole ground of memories come and gone.

(2011/6/20 Manzhouli; 2011/8/5 Shanghai)

Peacefully reclining: almost there, almost there.
Dreaming vertically, like a meeting, like a contract:
pine needles, wedding rings, a blurred slack mouth
hanging open strung with drool: half a life
passing promises that break up into halved lives.

Off-board, on-board, boring into Russia
Inner Mongolia Heilongjiang and back again to Russia.
Off-board, every seat takes its time
at every local station making up lost ground for half another lifetime.

The steam whistle dies down, never making it to Russian time
leaving home again and returning, reduced to
peacefully a recline: almost there, almost there.

(2011/6/20 Manzhouli;2011/7/18 Shanghai)

In the dining car, you might think the people would be
grateful for the wind of Nezha’s fiery wheel at the collective’s feet:
the collective wobbling, the collective lack of peace,
un-uniformed bodhisattvas, nothing fishy here.

People standing to eat noodles, grateful
for all that joins in refusing uniforms: look,
see the grasslands fast-forwarding to daybreak,
meat and potatoes piling high to form collective walls.

A proper uniform: a steady woman playing nice.
A burlap sack: a broken man breaking bad.

(2011/7/22 Shanghai)

The steam whistle blasts the previous dynasty dry, blows
Hundun’sprimordial chaos dry, bores holes through our days, eyes and ears
mouth and nose fresh and oozing every time the gears shift,
each station enduring its makeshift forgery with every violent push:

Suifenhe Station, Suiyang, Suixi, Tai Ridge, Red House, Ma Qiahe, Xia Chengzi, Muling, Mudanjiang, Yimainpo, Yuquan, A Cheng, Harbin, Wanle, Zhaodong, Anda Lake Road, Lamadian, Taikang, Angangxi, Fularji, Longjiang, Nianzishan, Genghis Khan, Zhalantun, Balin, Boketu, Miandu Ford, Yakeshi, Wild Goose, Hailar, Daliang, Uzernal, Ulanqiu, East Temple, Wangong, Du Lun, Ling Qiu, He’er, Hongde, Huangde, Haomen, Cuogang, Hubei, Zhalai Norr, Zhalai Nori West, East Gulley, Lubin, Manchuria.

(2011/6/18 Harbin to Manzhouli;2011/7/18 Shànghǎi)

The way the road splits all beneath Heaven: in black smoke
hung out to dry: strewn across the tracks to awaken
some slumbering sublimity, lying beyond all belief.

The earth never sleeps, yet sleepwalks
like bees rising into black smoke.

The internal combustion engine’s compassion dreams
of ancient fells: hay sticking
to cattle and sheep, feces, mud and urine
cold and grease-caked, the earth’s
smoke-stained filth teeming
with disease vectors.

The horseman’s teeth like rotting pine,
The look of insomnia like eyes hung out to dry in night skies.

Pity the hanging sun, patrolling summer’s surface.
From his chariot’s driven dream of power and will
the master of the plains dismounts, settles
into cement-choked Chineseness; cattle and sheep
wasting away summer-long bone-thin amidst a plague of rats.

Black smoke splits all beneath Heaven, alone
on horseback the emissary rides the rails
pretending at high speeds to remain still.

(2011/6/19 Manzhouli; 2011/7/18 Shanghai)

Harbin: crowds boil with commotion, the day’s crackling fat.
The trains have rendered White to Red, Russia devoured
its own students, night rendered superfluous by electricity, hand-in-hand
neon and Stalin forging the students of Russia.

Unable to afford to eat that day the poet had no choice but wait,
wait for a half-eaten egg wrapped in its juan bing, the wrapped-up old country mother
in from who-knows-where, the bitterly cursing old father,
neon and Stalin forging waiting-time’s crackling fat

for the poet half a lifetime of eating next to nothing, a half-eaten juan bing
offhandedly wrapped: offhandedness does not distinguish, the white day’s
offhandedness fattened by thirty hours, time’s next round of punishment
waiting for a derailed train to depart en route to yet more waiting.

(2011/6/18 Harbin; 7/12/2011 Shanghai)

Train windows: meditation’s rapid flow.
The marshy plains’ channels flow, wild ducks
lay their eggs in season, kowtow machines
and Iron Man Wang Jinxi in their meditation excluding me.

Frozen earth sealed off by heated insulated walls picturesque
waters rushing past: the train picks up speed, the train picks up ghosts.

Train windows: the future’s rapid flow.
The future: the deficiency of the time’s
train windows: anger settling on a plan.

Wild duck breeding season yields
eggs laid amidst the rapid flow’s tranquility.
The tranquility of oil never-ending.

Passing through Daqing, ghosts knock up against paying passengers’ hearts
wild ducks take flight: fare-dodgers ride black
taking refuge among one another, in time excluding me.

(2011/6/18 Harbin to Manchuria; 2011/7/15 Shanghai)

The contemporary: Now and then, she
lives within the momentary. Modern times
mean Greenwich Mean Time
lives lived caught on the tracks, anxiety,
tea foam nipping at its bowls’ walls. Now and then,
she demolishes man-made modern times,
she lives within the ​​self-immolation of the thought
of the contemporary: black smoke pours
toward Russia, progress’s
awaiting death cannot be torn down.