Collected Poems 1947-1997 - Ginsberg Allen - Страница 230

I sat up in bed and pondered what I’d learned

while I lay sick almost a month:

That monks who could convert Waste to Treasure

were no longer to be found among the millions

in the province of Hebei. That The Secret of the Golden Lotus

has been replaced by the Literature of the Scar, nor’s hardly

anybody heard of the Meditation Cushion of the Flesh

That smoking Chinese or American cigarettes makes me cough;

Old men had got white haired and bald before

my beard showed the signs of its fifty-eight snows.

That of Three Gorges on the Yangtze the last one downstream

is a hairpin turn between thousand-foot-high rock mountain gates.

I learned that the Great Leap Forward caused millions

of families to starve, that the Anti-Rightist Campaign

against bourgeois “Stinkers” sent revolutionary poets

to shovel shit in Xinjiang Province a decade before

the Cultural Revolution drove countless millions of readers

to cold huts and starvation in the countryside Northwest.

That sensitive poetry girls in Shanghai dream

of aged stars from Los Angeles movies. That down the alley

from the stone bridge at Suzhou were Jiang Ji spent

a sleepless night wakened by the bell of Cold Mountain Temple,

water lapping against his boat a thousand years ago,

a teahouse stands with two-stringed violin and flutes

and wooden stage. That the gold in the Sun setting

at West Lake Hangzhou is manufactured from black Soft Coal.

That roast red-skinned juicy entire dogs with eyes

bulging from their foreheads hang in the market at Canton

That So-Chan meditation’s frowned on and martial health

Qi-Gong’s approved by Marxist theoreticians. That men in

deep-blue suits might be kind enough to file a report

to your Unit on gossip they’ve heard about your secret loves.

That “Hang yu hang yu!” song is heard when workmen labor

yodeling on bamboo scaffolds over the street outside all night.

That most people have thought “We’re just little men,

what can we count” since the time of Qin Shi Huang.

VI

Tho the body’s heavy meat’s sustained

on our impalpable breath, materialists

argue that Means of Production cause History:

once in power, materialists argue what

the right material is, quarrel with each other,

jail each other and exile tens of millions

of people with 10,000 thoughts apiece.

They’re worse than Daoists who quibbled about immortality.

Their saving grace this year’s that all the peasants are fed.

VII Transformation of Bai’s “A Night in Xingyang”

I grew up in Paterson New Jersey and was

just a virginal kid when I left

forty years ago. Now I’m around the world,

but I did go back recently to visit my stepmother.

Then I was 16 years old, now I’m fifty eight—

All the fears I had in those days—I can still see myself

daydreaming reading N.Y. Times on the Chinese rug on the living room

floor on Graham avenue. My childhood houses are torn down,

none of my old family lives here any more,

mother under the ground in Long Island, father underground

near the border of Newark where he was born.

A highway cuts thru the Fair Street lot where I remember our earliest

apartment, & a little girl’s first kiss. New buildings rise on that street,

all the old stores along Broadway have disappeared.

Only the Great Falls and the Passaic river flow

noisy with mist then quietly along brick factory sides

as they did before.

10:15 P.M.

After Rewi Alley’s Bai Juyi, 200 Selected Poems (Beijing: New World Press, 1983), p. 303.

Black Shroud

Kunming Hotel, I vomited greasy chicken sandwiched

in moldy bread, on my knees before the white toilet

retching, a wave of nausea, bowels and bladder loose

black on the bathroom floor like my mother groaning

in Paterson 1937. I went back to bed

on the twelfth floor, city lights twinkling north,

Orion in his belt bright in the sky, I slept again.

She had come into the bathroom her face hidden

in her breast, hair overhanging her figure bent in front

of me, stiff in hypertension, rigor mortis

convulsed her living body while she screamed

at the doctor and apartment house we inhabited.

Some electric current flowing up her spine tortured her,

foot to scalp unbearable, some professional advice

required quick action, I took her wrists, and held her

bound to the sink, beheading her silently with swift

dispatch, one gesture, a stroke of the knife-like ax

that cut thru her neck like soft thick gum, dead quick.

What had I done, and why? Certainly her visage

showed the reason, strain and fright lasting thru death.

But couldn’t leave her body hidden in the toilet, someone

finding her bent over might wait, then push, then