Day-by-Day Life

---for Zhang Er  

It all comes back to the starting point of escape. Even your doubts are poetic…

Escape has no end. New crises lurk ready to spring from hidden places.

Except for the refuge of writing, what can be lasting and reliable?

Your daughter will grow, think her own thoughts, learn rebellious ways

Like we did once. Even at such a young age

They can read the signs, lean toward whoever holds power.

Lovers need to be master of their own emotions

Before they can relish joy, which would be an extravagant wish. Because

You are thirsty, emotional, spare of flesh. You are a poet.

You are a single scale on a fish's belly, with intentions

To write down that fish's life and times, but forgetting

That water pressure bears down everywhere.   

Water's boundless capacity is not for fleshly lives to penetrate,

And no fish traces through water's curvature back its origin.

No need to mimic its restless flow, but you can glide a familiar path

Like musical notes reflected upside-down. You were the one

Who supported a family, made meals, plucked poems from daily life.

From doing so much, your insufficiency glared in another's eyes.  

One tree's flowers cannot bloom on another's branches, and

Even knowing the right verb patterns, you must not harp upon the past.

Crevices of words are unavoidable among life's details,

Just like the advent of emptiness. From the account you give

I keep reading levels of blueness. Tranquil blue,

Tortured blue, capricious blue, enduring blue.

Different oceanic levels of blue. You must feel warmth from the cheeks

Of your three-member family collective. Just as our growth

Had to depend on certain irreversible flaws. Our happiness

Is poised on what happened; subsiding in pitfalls of memory.

Who says this is no age for desire to intensify? But your doubts take on gravity

Enough to contain the inner glow that blazed through a winter's day.  

At last you yielded, moved to the rainy Northwest countryside,

Settled in a house surrounded by meadows. The wind from the Pacific 

Blows over your poetry book. I think of you busy with your new household,

Buying things in town, trying out the local Chinese restaurant,

Teaching Chinese poetry at a college. Away from New York 's excitement,

I wonder if your heart has found tranquil contentment?

Does daily life blend into the vistas of your poems?

Maybe during this intermission your resilience can catch its breath:

Motherhood slowly finds the words for giving utterance to life,

But refrains from too much revelation. A cloud that understands everything

Screens off the secret leading to nothingness. Beneath a vaulted sky

Flecked with strawberry-red, your hefty inner life is raised up high

Nodding like the ripened corn.   
   

4/26/20004

Translated by Denis Mair

Last updated: November 29, 2004