by Albert Wendt
Mao’s calligraphy
is a wild flourish of defiance
His brush had plotted the Long
March across deserts
of words and death to give flesh
to a nation of bone Later
in his old age he tried to make
Revolution his people’s eternal bread
and swam the Yangtze to hold back
death his
Nightflight
The pen is my hand
searching for Mao’s passionate calligraphy
to unlock his tomb and
China’s soul can be
Nightflight The others sleep
or watch the Blacklight heroes
embrace and kiss (lightly —
no grappling below
the sacred navel!)
(I’m dying
for a piss but the toilets
are chocka!)
Nightflight
Borges is
dead
Calvino is
dead
masters of the calligraphy
of spells and magic
Nightflight Zhou Enlai is
dead spinner of cloth thread
that bound his country’s
visionary wounds
baker of the meagre bread
which fed the survivors
of Mao’s senility
Nightlight (One
dunny’s free — I’ll dash
for it!)
Nightflight (A good piss is
worth a thousand poems!)
Again I live in walking
this page
On the floating screen
our slim hero swears allegiance
to the Red Flag (and his beloved —
in that order)
(3) Shadow Control
Nightflight
Blacklight QF93 roars
on like the muffled anger
of the Yangtze China is
already memories fiction
this pen my hand discovers
Nightflight My hand is
this pen shaping
the Circle the Square
of this page the path of
my journey that for tonight
will trace Heaven’s blessing and
we won’t plunge into the abyss
beyond gravity
Nightflight
This pen can’t contain Deng
He won’t let me sleep this new Son of Heaven
He’s the wizard
of shadow control
the Dragon obeys
(4) Guilin
Nightflight My head’s
eyeballs as soggy
as blotting paper threaten not
to swivel to Guilin
where the sleep-
ing mountains are
green dragons
that shoulder the summer sky
and legends of Deng’s quest
for the American dollar
mountains that
float in mist like opium the Lijiang
steers to the cicada’s singing
in the evermoving present
(5) Runaway
Nightflight
Runaway Train is running away
on the screen
The Chinese passengers are awake
soaking up American mythologies: Jon Voight’s
melodramatic escape in the snows
of Alaska
(6) Pagoda
Nightflight In the Temple
of Grace in Xi’an the Big Wild Goose Pagoda
spirals up into Buddha’s dreaming
Xuanzang the enduring pilgrim
stored there the sutras he’d carried
across the mountains
and deserts from India
Before the golden Buddha
a priest strikes a gong
every time a pilgrim drops alms
into the donation chamber
Incense weaves white
wispy fingers to shape delicately
your prayers in Heaven’s image
We climb the precarious staircase
in the footprints of
the pilgrims of centuries
We rest at every storey
in the brick-arched doorways
and the healing dreams of
the city waft in
to cool us
We climb Buddha’s
inventive meditation
The city reels away away
into haze and the atua
Xuanzang fetched the scriptures
of the heart
from
We float in Buddha’s
balance between air/stone/fire
and the sutra that
doesn’t end
Indefinite as question marks
swallows wheel and dive around
the Pagoda in protest against
our flashing cameras that can’t
catch their quickness
Later in our descent
we meet eyes in
the corner darkness: an old priest
in the brown fabric
of eternity sits hunched
over his walking stick
His lips move
His fingers count the beads
of each silent word
that holds the universe
to its correct axis
His lips move
(7) Runaway Again
Nightflight
Runaway Train is a capitalist mish-
mash of symbolic suffering
and Hollywood stereotypes
of evil wardens and heroic
prisoners (Hope the icy
tundra freezes off
their symbols!)
(8) The Army
Nightflight My pen excavates
Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s vigilant Army of 6000
set up to protect his immortality
(Sons of Heaven demand
a nation’s blood
to feed their vanity)
The Army of Clay lives splendidly
We in our thousands come to stare
and marvel and marvel again
(NO PHOTOS ALLOWED)
The Army is
We circle It The soldiers gaze
ahead beyond us to the Emperor’s reawakening
but we of the atua-are-dead brigade
know Emperor Qin is really dead
He was no Son of Heaven
The soldiers are
We circle their eyes
their creators filled with bright
alertness that shapes the future
My skin bristles: Are we
the barbarians they’re expecting?
The whole precise band swinging
into action: the kneeling archers
firing ZZZITTT!
But they live on
in silent staring
The Army is
It is extending
It is alert to the future unaware
their Emperor is skeleton
The Army is now
art excavated from
an Emperor’s madness
to astound
us
It knows
It knows the Emperor’s
disease is and will be in us
(NO PHOTOS ALLOWED)
We’ll leave this
domed pavilion
and like Emperor Qin dissolve
into summer that rages
outside in the shadow
of other Emperors
with weaponries that’ll dissolve
the present
Watch Watch
the soldier’s eyes
Heed their wise gazing
(9) White Death
Nightflight
The Train is
hurtling to its white death
beyond the blue tunnels
Voight and his partner discover
a woman on board
(There’s
gotta be
natural romance: you can’t
have two macho convicts
falling in love not in
snow-white-clean Alaska or
on a CAAC flight — gays
ain’t welcome in the Party!)
our plane too
continues hurtling into night’s
dying held up by the whims
of atua (I don’t believe in)
(10) Cicadas
Nightflight In Guilin
as we strolled the night
by Banyan Tree Lake
the cypresses opened their throats
in cicada tongue and
I thought of Samoa
because there too
the cicadas give voice
to the darkness: their wave-
upon-wave lament is
the earth’s renewing sorrow
(11) A Poem is
Nightflight
My hand is the pen
that writes: A poem is
It invents the poet
who sings it (Jesus Voight’s
booting his partner in
the cowardly belly and testicles
Boot boot boot!
The civilised girl is
screaming: Stop it Stop it You animal!
Voight growls back: Ah’m
Ah’m human Yeah human!
(Christ stop this flight I wanna get
off if this is the way
our lives are scripted!)
Nightflight A poem is
about other poems
Mao was invented by
his poems which invented
a nation through revolution
The only poet to rule
a billion poems
Me/this/plane
this page/those passengers are about
other mes/other planes/other pages/other passengers
in the many-world theory
that now explains reality
(Einstein couldn’t conceive
of such poetic physics
He remained part-Newtonian
to his toenails to the end)
(12) Forest
Nightflight
Imagine a forest of steles massive
tablets of stone cut polished and
calligraphed on since written
language named us
2000 in rows waiting
in their stillness for your deciphering
Then go to Xi’an
to the Historical Museum and
in the cool lanes of the Forest
wander and dream
Many of the steles ride
stone turtles worn shiny smooth
by the touch of seekers just like you
Try unravelling
their blood their carved flourishes
and whispers
Catch your reflection
in the astute polish of
their scrutiny
Close your eyes
run your fingers like someone
blind over their faces
and let them read you
into flesh and
the future
(13) Poems as Aliens
Nightflight I once knew
a poet who snared poems
in his broom cupboard
like the cannibal nest in Aliens
He needed to gloat
and unkeyed his treasure:
ZAP-ZAP-ZAP! the poems
through their ferocious probosces
leeched him dry to a parchment
no ink could stick to
(14) Watermelons
Nightflight
The snarling warden’s in a black
helicopter firing down at
the Train that’s snaking
in and out
of tunnels through mountains
as heavy as drowning
(By the way
if you’re no watermelon addict
don’t go to China in the summer —
that’s the season of
a billion melons that
have to be eaten!)
(15) Our Gift
Nightflight Our gift is
to be outside our blood
at our choosing
recording the pulse rate of our dying
In Guilin
a wretched man lies on
the uncaring pavement laughing
into his eyes like broken marbles
I’ve seen him before in all
the cities I’ve visited
When did he fall from
the sacred Circle into
the Square that is our confinement?
(16) Balance
Nightflight
QF93 continues
to balance the night
that is running backwards
(I lost the helicopter warden
duelling the Train ten minutes
earlier But saintly Voight’s
now poised as the Crucifixion
on the ice-holy roof of the Train
rocketing towards matyrdom
It’s snowing lightly
but forever as described
by Joyce in The Dead)
(17) A Talent
Nightflight Jenny’s curled up
beside me Is she constructing
stairs into a slee
she can enter? Hers is the talent
to sleep whereve
(18) Temple of Heaven
Nightflight
As a boy I’d wanted to be
a tree skeleton branching
into green sky legends
and down into earth’s fertile
tales of genesis
When I met the Cypress of Nine Dragons
in the Temple of Heaven I recognised
the tree I’d searched
to live as But I was now
another creature unable
to believe in dragons
Nightflight Fast in the cool
of the Cypress of Dragons and
in your opium dreaming invent
the sacrificial Altar of Heaven:
three tiers of green and white marble circled
by balustrades surfaced
with stone slabs in multiples
of Heaven’s number
Pause Suck on
the pipe that knows
the secrets of illusion
Out of your owl eyes fish
the circular stone
to heart the top platform
Place it at the centre (Feel
its breathing body under
your fingers?)
Pause Then in
the mathematics of shamans construct
concentric circles of 9/18/27 until
the ninth of 81 slabs and
the tapu is contained
utterly
Don’t be afraid Carry
your offering of live bone
to the stone heart of the Altar
Stop Raise it to
the Fire that created
the cosmos speak softly
Your prayer will echo
from the balustrades
(no one else will hear it)
You are atua
You are the offering
(19) Boat
Nightflight
My reading light’s the only live eye
in the cabin
Moored to the jetty
of the Lake of the Summer Palace
is a boat (three massive
storeys like a mausoleum)
of marble that can’t sail:
the entire navy the Empress promised
the nation but turned a fortune
of the people’s poverty
into the peacock vanity
of her Palace
Magnificent in its uselessness
the waters will always
bear the boat’s
bone-white reflection
Art is
but the Empress
&n
bsp; died
(20) Blue Sky and O
We dined with Blue Sky in Anhui
trainer of acrobatic champions who
in his shelter
defeated gravity and
somersaulted out of their skins
into his wild blue
daring
Mr O the perfect
Circle was our guide in Hefei
I envied his completeness
his refusal to be
(21) The Wall
Nightflight Walls
imprison/protect/cut off/shield
Walls hide/keep in secrets/keep
out marauders
Walls frame our seeing
Walls don’t happen
We grow them
The Great Wall
lives in us Emperor Qin conquered
the six kingdoms and dragged
the Wall across our fears to protect
what he’d hoarded
out of the killing
Centuries later
my grandmother constructed it
across the geography of my dreaming
and I yearned to see the truth
of our defence against barbarians
Nightflight
It’s raining gently pinpricks on
my skin as our car chases
its reflection up Juyong Pass
The peaks are crowned
with the mist and cloud of
my grandmother’s tales
The hills display the lush flowers
of her telling
Suddenly
It’s there the Wall a giant’s crooked finger directing us
to infinity over the jagged ridges
Then we’re at Badaling among
other pilgrims come
to measure their childhood wonder
Nightflight Michel Foucault is
dead Umberto Eco is
alive conjurers of the vocabulary
of decoding the illusion
of language
and living in history
The Wall is
no illusion It is more
than history It is
black granite rising
to parapets as wide as
six horses that dip/rise/buck
dive/swerve left to right
over a continent of mythology
Nightflight
Take the first step up one
Then the second (The stone
trembles beneath you)