FAN XUE
FOUR POEMS
translated by Austin Woerner and Zhixian Zhang
A Living Myth
We threw our arms around each other
and in that moment I felt the gentle heat of his body.
Just like that, with one touch, all my expectations were released.
He was like a still-frame from a dream,
projecting so many lovely, twilit things,
playing out all those words and gestures that made me happy.
Articulating pride in his laconic syllables,
blunt as the dry, serpentine mountains around us,
and yet so eager to express himself, in that typical adolescent way.
In a daze, I looked at his glorious scars,
reacquainting myself with all the old familiar gallantries,
wishing I could care for every bit of him,
this strong-rooted, hardy nature, quick to kindle
and purer than any legend.
I felt like I was embracing something absurdly perfect
but past its time.
Youth is always past its time: unpopular, unsophisticated.
That adolescent quality I find so touching
and this youthfulness right before my eyes, so handsome and gentle and immediate—
they were both past their time.
Even gangsters were past their time
and violence too.
These mountains were a great body, the center of the world,
but right then they were whipping forward the speed of our obsolescence.
From the snow-white crowd on those high plains
we felt a bit of true human warmth:
me holding onto a frozen, twilit dream,
and him, as he became more and more fervent,
it knocked my heart down and rebuilt it, again and again.
The South
Old paint faded from years in the sun
—my lost sun, your lost willow—
and brown rust stains on those walls
always pink, baby blue or white,
smelling faintly of blood. At first I didn't like it,
now I can almost believe I’ve forgotten it.
Along Airport Avenue, tall trees full of rainwater
brood like Buddhas against the sky.
Too many reminders.
Wet air opening and closing like a scallop,
me trapped in a fish tank between ocean and sensation,
sliding down the mosaic hallway of a Cantonese hotel.
A room with a small, white-tiled sun porch,
windows with frames of tea-colored aluminum.
After my third shower of the day, I can finally forget it.
In the window over the desk, broad-leafed trees
thunder their greenness at the edge of the jungle.
A long concrete road lined with coffee shops, bus stops,
thin city breezes, bits of past experience
blowing across night streets and gauzy dresses.
That's what's reliable. What actually happened is fiction.
Walking back, I collect little balls off the sedges
while the synecdoche of nature and destiny eats away at my affections.
The bathtub smells fishy, shifting borders of lust.
In my hands, a few glans nuts, desert ginseng,
journeys north and south, milk-white oysters, a tighter road.
Falling limp among gilt flowers, alone, remembering.
The delicate, the beautiful, the yin and the yang:
a living fecundity, a banquet
decorated with broken shells
and birds and flowers in crimson.
Scattered Age
after Miyuki Nakajima’s “Rollin Age”
There’s a phone still ringing in the construction site
and the white curtain you imagine fluttering in the window
looks like a flag of surrender.
They say there's a dengue outbreak in Singapore this year
and as for the canals of Hangzhou, I don't go there anymore.
On the mainland, a handful of scattered infections
have conquered all hearts that can be conquered
while on WeChat, photos of food and flowers from California
are so easy to reply to, and political signals so hard.
You can't stop watching these men working
and it's like you're walking past a construction site at 3 a.m.,
signal lights flashing on wet city streets
overloading your ultrabright inner sensitivity,
a 6000K color temperature on a cold night filled with police sirens
illuminating the loneliness that envelops unrest.
At a certain age, in any age
one needs a storm, a show of resistance against life.
The wind blowing through the bright orange construction site
this summer while the Mekong is in flood
transplants Hawaii grass inside, along with the floor-to-ceiling window blinds.
It must have been our dreams,
those sweltering rivers, that made even desire
seem fuller in the past. And you can read between the pages
that beyond people's naked embraces
there's a whole world at stake, fates of entire nations,
everything at stake, an earthshaking future about to dawn.
And yet people know next to nothing
and the construction site—it knows nothing at all.
Here amid graceful grass-green tiles
a pink bathing pool is being built, a modernist bathing pool
filled with the democratic soap bubbles of lives in the present—
and I don't know what to talk about
except sweetness and excitement.
Push back the curtains and ask the darkness:
what is life all about?
After all, we could just go our separate ways,
just as the spring sunlight makes this blossoming season far too gorgeous;
for any other historical destiny
we will always offer our blessings and support.
Push back the curtains
and return once again to humanity's childhood:
totally earnest and cooperative
in a bright orange room flying the flag of our surrender.
Get in the Car and Look at the View
Let's set some scenery to this real-world story.
Let's drive along the edge of the continent,
watching the fertile depths of the frontier roll by.
Look at the view, then give it a story:
a contemporary one, with wavering hills, factory haze, cities above the sea.
Enough about me.
Sea and sky perturb one another, massing thousands of green islands.
Who'd have thought every boundary was an abyss?
So many good boys in this world—
too bad they're all married, including my husband.
Wet waves of fog boil up over the shore.
In this mist, our powers of feeling are insufficient.
Crossing the Mirror Channel, still white clouds
bleach the green mountains rising from the ocean.
Over the brine, big steel ships
and gantries draw the shoreline toward extremes.
Action is the only realistic thing:
here, image explodes common sense.
I feel it, dizzying and violent,
and skim over it like a tourist.
Zhoushan to Ningbo, 2021
