Two Poems: My Fulrbight Submission

For the 2010-2011 Fulbright, I proposed spending time in Nanjing China, studying Tang and Song classic poetry and working with contemporary poets and artists.  My goal is to write these poems that draw from classic Chinese verse to capture part of the the modern world, hopefully exporting Westward the ideas that are significant to Chinese intellectuals today.  Here are the two samples I’ve finished:

Traveler’s Night
after 旅夜書懷 by DuFu

Sawtoothed, seemingly frozen,
The beachline and its grasses
In moonlight like combed snow
Twist with the force of wind and tide.
There’s my boat, as if abandoned,
A silhouette where the stars drop
Studding the hull while that lone mast’s
So-as-not-to-tip is awash in a sky
As fearsome as hail.  And the moon.

Stretched long by the river, it
Tries to drain into the ocean,
Leave its deep-space missives
High above.  Its sonar older than
Sea and ship and their hollowness,
Older than depth and emptiness,
So infinitely older than words for those
Or for cold-cutting starlight
That washes the field ghostly and
My ship.  And too, this brain of mine,
Washed all white.

And what sort of word-count
Sums up a man?  What’s easiest
Never changes, our ships are title
And stature, our mast’s been staked.
Mariners long sick with the North-star
Shortness of heart, spirits wan, eyes
Captured by the way a book’s pages turn
Frosty in moonlight (which they don’t,
really, not at all).  What could
The moon add to this, then,
Other than the old its age-old
edict of “DRIFT FOR ME,
.                                            DRIFT…”

I’ll add only the wilt by the water,
The blank echo of the hull.  All else -
The miles between this world
And that, the distance of Heaven
and Earth, already it’s full measure taken,
Whose notches are the bright rows
Of a million beached sea gulls.

Wayfarer’s Midnight Mooring

Moon’s down.  Now you look at its absence
In the blue-hued reaches above the dark city skyline
And fill with the sound of a single crow’s cawing.
Through blind alleys, down markets steel-shuttered
And still, sleepless as the frost-full sky, you
Move past car-lights not long since died.

The river maple seems stiff with autumn’s pall,
The riverwalk uneven and the river like coal slag
Are made for first frost’s ether, but the maple won’t
Bend.  Streetlights wink a certain road ahead and seem
To promise destinations though there is none, since
The possible stretches in all directions but that one.

Suzhou forgotten this could be, the haloed skyline
missing the moon.  Somewhere in the dark above the river
Could be that cold, cold mountain temple and that
Trembling could be the bell settling from the toll
Before this icy silence.  Tableau after tableau,
These empty streets line up like glass-eyed dominos.

The frost-streaked sky, trees like wire-lines, the circling
Falcon of time returns to your hanging hand with nothing.
On ruinous bridge you wait for someplace to go.
Just below I’ve moored my boat, and wondering at the tides
That travel through the city, watch for where
The moon had stood on my journey through the wild.