by Ouyang Yu
time
The half-broken watch, the bed, filled up and empty—
Still the dead man’s heavy sleep until next morning,
as if dreaming a non-dream
Untitled
my heart, high up there in the sky, wordless
why so exiled, so solitary?
can’t you see the tearful man lean with hope
pining for you every night, affectionate?
you have left me, not even with a “goodbye”
the storm pounced down in an instant, where to find you?
the morning light paved the way on the water
but went out just as I started on my journey
depths of night, i opened the window, to let in the
dewed breeze
i saw you then—but what a strange face!
before i was a-wing, i awoke to the bondage of the earth,
you gazing at me, pale-faced, expressionless
ah, moon, my heart, come back to my breast!
despite the extinction of poetry and the tyranny of darkness
look, the creek so glittering beneath the cowpea frame
and an unknown bird singing from afar
Home
A premature seed
Was buried in the soil of home
It had not sprouted for years
And had no hope of flowering
Struggling in bitterness
And full of imagination
In a soil that contains alkaline and acid
Under a changeable weather
So it started drifting
On a lonely transcontinental journey
In search of its own place
Under a sky few recognise
Despite the vastness of an alien land
And the otherness of the place
The seed has found its only enrichment
In the barrenness of this soil
Years and years of silence
Have brewed up mellow thoughts
Time slips through fingers, like sands
Quietly dropping onto the paper
In another century
The seed will be nowhere to be found
And the square characters shaped like dream boxes
Will call here home
Rain stopped late at night
the rain stopped i know not when
the night still noisy in my ears
and my heart, like the stepping stone under the eaves,
was reflecting the wet lamplight
In the Future
No one will be dependent on anyone
However much power he or she has got
No one will respect anyone
Even if he or she has got 100 Nobel Prizes in literature
No one will love anyone
Although anyone can make love to anyone else
No one will worship anyone
As the word can be deleted from dictionaries
No one will like anyone
Just like one attempts to find friends on Facebook
But in vain as he can’t find any that he wants to befriend
That’s what I think it will be like in the future
Poem
From when I was a child
I did not wish to be a poet
Until I am old, I am not willing to claim
To be a poet
Seeing that everyone else vies with each other in
becoming a big poet I become, silent, wordless
Poetry
Finds me
Like music
Finds an instrument
Fingers find
The strings or the keys
The mouth
Wraps around the head of a clarinet
Or the arm
Embraces a cello
My life
Is not that of a poet
It is an instrument
It is a poetry-instrument
It is the wind going through
A decaying, inevitably crumbling, temple
Poetry
Is not me
I
Am not poetry
A Person is Gone
before the other person has come back from overseas
the only evidence that that person is gone
is the fragments of information on the lips of the living
and pieces of memory the other person who has come
back from overseas has
a person is gone
some say they have not heard of this
as if the going is a normal thing
some say they have heard of it
they use the verb “hear of”
some use medical terms
in retelling the story they use the words ‘it seems’
the other person remembers that person taking him to
a concert
the only expensive thing he did in Shanghai while both
were doing their Master’s Degrees
and he remembers the sumptuous dinner that person
invited him to when he became a deputy general manager
and the fish: an electrical toy set that person gave his
son for a present
he ponders: when a person is gone
one should not remember these vulgar trivialities
when he told his wife of this in a phone call across the ocean
she only “oh” ed
he’s done his sums:
when that person was gone he must have been forty
and he himself
has lived now to forty-four
Acknowledgments
Poems included in this collection have appeared in such collections of poetry as Moon over Melbourne and Other Poems (first published by Papyrus Publishing, 1995, new UK edition by Shearsman Books, London, 2005), Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes (Wild Peony Press, 2002), Soul Diary, published as part of Triptych Poets (Blemish Books, 2011), Moerben zhi xia (Summer in Melbourne) (Chongqing Publishing House, 1998), xiandu (The Limit) (Otherland Publishing, Beijing, 2004), and er du piao liu (Second Drifting) (Otherland Publishing, Beijing, 2005), as well as a diverse range of literary magazines and journals here and overseas, too many to include here.
I thank Ms Huang Dan for collaborating with me on my self-translation of ‘Don’t Say’, ‘Sinking into Darkness’, ‘Flying Close to the Earth’, ‘The Lights’, ‘Winter’ and ‘It’s Going to Snow’ and I also thank Mr Liang Yujing for collaborating with me on two self-translated poems, ‘Zero Distance’ and ‘No Title’.
Ouyang Yu was born in Huangzhou, China. Since arriving in Australia in 1991, Ouyang has commenced an extraordinarily prolific literary career as a poet, critic, translator, editor and novelist. His award winning fiction includes The Eastern Slope Chronicle (2002) and The English Class (2010). He is also well known for his fine command of poetic craft and his poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and newspapers, and have been frequently anthologised. His first poetry collection, Moon Over Melbourne, was published in 1995, and has been followed by further collections. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
More at: www.ouyangyu.com.au
Photograph: Wang Jinjun