Ouyang Jianghe [China]

 

Who is Gone, and Who Remains
 
Dusk: the boy secrets himself in a tree-root,
eavesdropping on the innards of insects.
What he hears is not the world of insects
but the world outside: for example, innards of machines.
The setting sun turns beneath his feet like the wheel of a truck,
the boy’s father drives a truck
the truck is empty
parked in an empty field.
The father gets out, and the soundless beauty of the sunset strikes him dumb.
He turns off his crying cell phone, says to the boy:
all things turning at the edge of the sky
have lips, have tongues. But they speak only amongst themselves,
erecting their ears upon this speech.
The boy, refusing to believe in the ears of things, listens to the ears of his heart.
In truth, he is not listening at all,
but, by not listening, he overhears
a different kind of hearing—
he invents his own deafness, and soars,
rising on mute updrafts of imagination.
Behind our everyday sunset, could there be
a miracle-world alive with voices?
Could there be another boy listening, another sun
sinking in the west?
Staggering sky—
The world has fallen silent: a telephone rings on, unanswered.
Machines and insects cannot hear each other’s heartbeats,
and the root has been ripped from the soil.
The boy’s deafness becomes dream-vision, protocol, brogue.
The truck is broken
his father buries his head under the hood
and his mother sleeps, sunset cradled in her arms, unaware
of the coming of night, the coming of age.
 
 
Nuclear Button
 
Try to extract the nuclear button from the pituitary gland
try pressing a billion years of nuclear insanity
into the instant insanity just before detonation
to hypothesize, to countdown, to reset all to zero
 
But if the ecstasy of the instant were real
then in the beginning creation must have been some originary god’s depression
preordaining wind and moonlight without bounds
then recalculating everything with a surplus-zero algorithm
 
Only after it happened did he turn back to decide
how it should have happened, so that in nuclear proliferation
it would not be confined by the immense
but contained in the infinitesimal
 
As love erases us like a dream
Every palm leaf rustled by the wind contains its sacred ash
 
(Translated by Austin Woerner)

 
Author’s Bionote:
 
*Jianghe Ouyang, was born in Sichuan Province in 1956, China. As a nationally known poet, and a critic on poetry, music and culture, his works have been published since 1979, including over 200 poems, many articles on poetry. As a Poet, Jianghe Ouyang’s writing accentuates the originality and sophistication of thoughts and hybridity of language, emphasizes the deep links between personal experience and public realities. He is recognized as one of the most important poets of China since 1980s.