小姐姐,好漂亮 daily the love notes from strangers in other hemispheres
can I live on these every day without anyone touching me
—without anyone looking at my face in person
they don’t know the swollen stone in my body, my lungs like a hagfish a beat-up grin
∞
to be a woman poet is to disconnect, despair, experience kingdom-destroying pleasure
at the museum I saw the hairpieces of courtesans who ate raw osmanthus from silver ewers
they ornamented themselves to resist a promise of decay
but decay is just a matter of getting closer to the earth the worms breathing underneath all bored
punish me to lie down with my ears on the soil, hear the footfalls of past lovers, a clamor of pangs
—whose laughter hurts the most?
∞
in the pleasure garden, all my ex-lovers meet each other snakes and snapping turtles bite the stems off water lilies
some speak English, others can’t communicate some will make friends, others will make enemies
by the glow of the scholar’s rocks, they guzzle sorghum wine and most of them hate poetry, so likely they’ll plot escape
some of them stay, develop an attachment to tending gardens, some of them love snapping the bonsai trees’ miniature branches
some’ll survive on catching koi, roasting all their golden scales some’ll sleep in the orchid pavilions, argue over how to leave
and I will not touch them, I hide in eaves, stay in the lookout tower with my brass telescope, the past smudged on its lens
∞
in the pleasure gardens, the courtesans sometimes wrote carp-bitten love poems, painted silk mountains, ambergris, embroidered lucky bats, blue peach trees
I read about them: how they destroyed their kingdoms with their fatal beauty
how they rose up the ranks and bewitched their kings
all the regicides committed in their names
and here in my corner I’m watching the hot wind flog the legendary West Lake
bored by the supremacy of romance, I eschew the water lily’s idolatry
the sight of them reminds me that I do not want to live forever
"As long as there have been poets, nature has been there to serve as a muse. But what of the more immediate and tactile environment of the garden? For some of the greatest poets, all the important lessons and metaphors about life can be found somewhere right outside the back door."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"The most influential genre of Classical Chinese Poetry is called ‘regulated verse’ (各路诗), and these forms gather the world into words and refold them into inter-resonant patterns on a cosmological scale. Each monosyllabic word must be stacked in relation to the one before and after, above and below until the whole rests upon a final balanced point, as relaxed and exact as a cairn of transparent quartz."
