Changming Yuan

You know it damn too well: You can never
Hope to maintain your posthumous metaphor
Behind your very best poem, nor can you
Expect your capitalized name to remain
Permanently visible on the hardest tombstone
But you could tell your family to convert your
Entire being (together with all the words you
Have chosen for poetry) into fertilizer, spreading it
Around the metasequonia you have planted deep
In this foreign soil, where you can supply
Enough nutrition to a leaf or a twig, through
Which you can take some oxygen from the air
And even hold a dewdrop on a summer morning
Watching another, and just another civilization
Unfolding itself beyond this immortal tree

Born with a deformed heart muscle
You are as timid, introverted and cowardly
As a little quiet chick, but all your life
You have been trying to play tough, forcing
Yourself to be tough-minded, tough-bodied
Like an iron fighter rooster in the legend
Until now your worsening ischemia
Drives you into your old premature self-hood
With cardio neurosis, trembling, all
Thanks to a tenant, a sociopath, a rattlesnake
More evil than Satan, whose greatest joy
Is to destroy you as a petty landlord
Of a rental property full of foreign words

oh my lord, no longer do I remember
the exact wording of my oath
(that may well contain the phrase ‘relieve suffering’)
but I am still keenly aware of
my ever high-sounding profession
to which I had to lie to enter in the first place:
I volunteered at nursing homes and
community centers, not because
I really had a loving heart, but because
I needed that to be impressive
on my resume, on my application
to the prestigious medical school

now often do I claim to cure everything
though nothing in reality, I pretend to be
nice, polite and caring, though tired of all that
I never put my patients’ health before profits
not because I fear to be black-listed
but because I think I deserve more than I gain

let the patient get sick, better bleed
so I can give pills or send him
to hospitals, where my partners can
get at him, with knives or more pills

By now, the words like good
Beautiful, and truth have been so abused
They are meaningless
Reduced to blanks or holes
And the whole language becomes
Insufficient, deformed, absurd:
People are trying to communicate in a dialect
Or, rather, in a series of utterances
Whose meanings are yet to be invented

We have a syntax as powerful as before
But we have no more proper words in the proper place

When stars are out, they are visible, but when lights are out, they are not
When your wind up your watch, your start it, but when you wind up a poem, you end it
Houses can burn up as they burn down, where you fill in a form by filling it out

A slim chance is the same as a fat one, but a wise man is by no means a wise guy
Quite a few and quite a lot are alike, but to overlook is not to oversee
The weather can be hot as hell in summer and cold as hell in winter

As we live, our alarm clock goes off by going on

At birth, we were given pet names
In school, we begin to have formal names
For some fame, we choose our own style names
Among friends and relatives, we are known by our nicknames
In the literate world, we use our hao or pen names
While we try naming ourselves with all glory and dignity
Foreign barbarians give us unnamed names:
Mangis, Chinks, Chinamen, Chinkies
Chinoiseries, Nuocs, Shina, Chinees
Ching Chong, Coolies
Even blue and grey ants
And so they call us names
In open defiance against Confucius
Our master teacher, our saint, our sage, our literary god
(O poor guy!) ever so obsessed with the Chinese idea:
A proper name for a proper identity