Five Juéjù From Li Bai

Yellow Crane Tower:
Farewell to Meng Haoran on his Trip to Guangling

To Yellow Crane Tower and the West you wave goodbye
Under March mist's blossoms you descend towards Yangzhou
Your lone sail vanishes into the shadows of jade mountains
Until all I see is the Yangtze flowing to the edge of the sky


黄鶴樓送孟浩然之廣陵

故人西辭黃鶴樓
煙花三月下揚州
孤帆遠影碧山盡
惟見長江天際流



Visit to Lu Shan: Waterfall

Sun lights the violet mist of Incense Stove Mountain
Far off I see a waterfall hanging above a stream
It flies out spreading down three thousand feet
I think it is the Silver River falling from Seventh Heaven


望廬山瀑布

日照香爐生紫煙
遙看瀑布掛前川
飛流直下三千尺
疑是銀河落九天



Night Thoughts

Across the floor bright moon so bright
I think it is hoarfrost on the fields
I lift my head to gaze at the bright moon
I hang my head thinking of home


夜思

床前明月光
疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月
低頭思故鄉



Descent to Jiangling

Dawn farewell to Baidi among the glowing clouds
Three hundred miles to Jiangling in one day's float
Monkeys howl from both shores without stop
Already my skiff has passed ten thousand rows of mountains


下江陵

朝辭白帝彩雲間
千里江陵一日還
兩岸猿聲啼不住
輕舟已過萬重山



For Wang Lun

Li Po climbs aboard wishing to leave
Suddenly from shore the sound of footfalls and song
Peach Blossom Pool is a thousand feet deep
Doesn't touch how Wang Lun's farewell makes me feel


贈汪倫

李白乘舟將欲行
忽聞岸上踏歌聲
桃花潭水深千尺
不及汪倫送我情



Translated by Andrew Haley


Lǐ Bái (李白), known in the West as Li Po, was born to exiles in present-day Kazakhstan in 701. He spent his youth in Sichuan, near Chengdu, studying Taoism and other subjects. Rather than sit for the civil service exam, Li Bai left Sichuan at the edge of twenty-five, sailing down the Yangtze River. For thirty-five years, he led an itinerant, drunken, profligate and prolific life -- never settling anywhere for long, and writing upwards of a thousand poems which are considered among the apex of Chinese literature. Li Bai drowned in the Yangtze in 762, trying to drunkenly embrace the moon. He was returning to Sichuan after a life of exile.

The poems here are juéjù -- a poetic form popular in the Tang era. They are quatrains with either seven or five syllable lines, an aaba rhyme scheme and a distribution of tones that seeks to give the poems a tonal regularity. Heavily influenced by Taoism and Chán -- a Chinese prototype of Zen that flourished in the Tang dynasty -- juéjù strive to "see the big within the small" (小中見大).

Lucille Clifton

27 June 1936 - 13 February 2010

Tomás Eloy Martínez

16 July 1934 - 31 January 2010

JD Salinger

1 January 1919 - 27 January 2010

Six Poems From Andrea Perkins

Dance With Parent

you must have a strong leg,
sticky hands, and be free on saturday

to take this class
you must be vivid, wrong, submerged

the soft, warm head of your child
obvious, the rest buried in sand

or earth, that spinning cradle
which only breaks under the heavy flapping of ghosts

you will learn how to balance on air’s cutting edge
and lift infant up until it spreads all ten limbs

outward, gazing forward, moving always up


The Weight of Hair

there is a point at which we cross over
and with the ease of landed gentry or a small animal
meet the monster of light, abraxas,
or as they say here, abracadabra

until that happens, your expectations will be knifing you,
hope and fear interchangeable,
you might even bury your heart up to the neck
and leave a glimmering in the vestibule
next to your root and claw
and all because life is passing and there is no coin
that can get you back

so what if the day moves in and down
towards its own red ending?
maybe down in that hole,
is the bottom, the beginning
or at the very least an electricity made
by all this

words that are waves not baskets
baskets that are macabre embroilments
not love, subpoenaed by marshlight,
by rings of saturn crossing seas of ice

my advice is:

write your name in snow
so nobody who is sleepwalking
in the forest will see it
later, when they awake
from hunger and cold, from dreams of fur and gold,
wearing pajamas, they will see smoke
in the distance and follow it back to camp
all the while wanting heated mansions,
hearts with wings or skulls with wings

ok so this is where it starts getting into trouble
like it’s two in the morning and we’re going into a walgreens


Plow

nail in the wall,
unfinished pearl,
onions splitting their shoots in the near ground

my reflection
in the expanse of cold window
grows a beard of night

nail in the wall, stick in the mud,
a Grecian perfection of loins and teeth and the future
which is already here, a cathedral
where I spit out my time
and awaken

in this little life
a plow is both a shape and a tool


Our Mascot The Angel

in this most difficult of games
the winner must molt his or her wings like beetles in heat
and wind round with wings and legs in a kind of
dark glomming until he or she is vani-
shed.
another, easier game, played in the ancient night with cards
and natural masks, is still played even today.
down in the valley they call it ‘love in a laundromat.’
the loser of it sings a tidy lament on augury and vice.


Free Labor
taken almost entirely from a piece of junk mail
sent to the author on Christmas

4 apprentices (2 sitting, 2 standing)
talking about the luster of certain strawberries.
the silence that follows is yellowy.

the practice of the apprentices
is to work in their own time
or for money wages,
a quarter dollar a day.

work from six to nine, then breakfast. work
from ten to one, then lunch. from three to six,
rest.

others work in little gardens around negro houses
and seem always well pleased to be fully employed.
i know a small estate worked exclusively on this system.
it is in excellent order.


Three Poems

1. Hacienda

make no mistake,
they went there

family got into car on dark street,
sprinklers hissing all around

there was no time
for binoculars

in vast cement basements
dogs ate light


2. Ur

pluck the string
and the girl moves for you,
gives you a soft courage
beneath the teetering worm

stop looking up, look down, they say
they say: work work

and no ocean known, or just one
loaned on erasure


3. Basic Night

there are no other worlds without end

may ends, then a month without water

the townspeople drink dew from leaves
twice in a year without rain
the prize goes to the one who can stand
all day with a gaping hole in his chest



Andrea Perkins' non-fiction has appeared in Egypt Today, Coast News, MetroActive and New West Magazine. Her poetry has been found in Paper Salad, The Cement Boat, Girls With Insurance and elsewhere. She writes mostly fiction, but this has only (so far) shown up on lamp posts in her friend Otis' imagination. Born in Utah, she has lived in Egypt, California, Tennessee, and currently Hawaii.

New Poetry From Sundin Richards

The Last of The First of The Last

Conversazione
you can't barge

In here without
permission

I'm deeply sick
of you

And want to be
left alone

Lorn not
crazy

Waiting
for the sky

To sur
render

You spin
and your

Hair spins
with you

Fire your flies
all you want

It won't change
things

O grace that
I miss

O hunger
skipped

My very
own Alecto

Tighten the
screws a bit

I'm starting
to get soft

Under the
overpass

Heliotaxis
is the only job

A necessary
trip or function

The real cause
and ruction

Of all this
movement

Never is
always

Is the
genius loci

Of this
field of fire

I've made
this saftey

Ex gratia
exactly

Cheers to a
mobacracy

The main spring
done sprung

I'm going to sink my
teeth in you now

Warm and
friendly

Comb the
barbiturates

Out of
your hair

And climb
in the car

My love
we've got

Aways
to go yet

Despite the
calendar

Or
phenomenon

So I'm a
heresiarch

So
what?

This idiolect
will last as

Long as it
needs to

A switcheroo
a switchblade

I held you dear
in the late

Morning of
this thing

Short shadows
are guessed

Growing longer
is assumed

In all
sincerity

Put on your
gym shoes

And kick
rocks

An S carved
into flesh

A stereopticon
for heritage

Thanks for treat
ing me so well


Sundin Richards' poems have appeared in Girls With Insurance, Colorado Review, Interim, Volt, Cricket Online Review and Western Humanities Review, where he won first place in the 1999 Utah Writers' Contest. His book The Hurricane Lamp is forthcoming from ONLS press.

New Poems From Reid Mitchell

FELISBERTO HERNANDEZ

You built dolls for the owner

of the black house, played piano

for the scenes you put in his mind,

gave him two wives, one bride unstripped,

hydraulic cunts, and mirrors

too many to count. You invited

all of us into the black house,

and I went in not knowing

that I could never get out.

Nights have grown so long

I need some woman to hold

but you have made me afraid

of trusting where I touch. The owner

of this house hired imaginations.

Imagine me a way to get out.

No Trumpets

When I arrive to desert rock and the long laddered night

to wrestle crude angels and dislocate my hip,

I find a trick, a cornball trick: there’s only me:

A cheap, shoddy revelation, not worth the making.

So I squat and I dream of water in a cold clay jug

that I must tug from your rough hands.

You have some notion of blessing me

with scattered drops lost from your sacred palms

and magic’d away before they plop

on my increasingly golden head,

my self-appointed saint

with your cool alabaster mosaic feet.

I dream and squat halfway to almanac’d dawn.

The angel of fire and the angel of ice

the angel of sun and the angel of testimony

play dice over our ghosts,

a penny a point,

and leave us egg, salt, and flatbread for manna,

dew to drink whenever we, shadowless, wake

from our never sufficient sleep,

and start our days again, blinded.

YOU DON’T GET ONE THING WITHOUT THE OTHER

My days have known nothing of my nights

furious storms breaking retaining walls

and floods that drowned my mind

stranded my soul on slate rooftops

sent my eyes and lips and liver floating fast

and boiled waters into waste

My nights, spent in shelters with night people

assembling new solutions from a saved pocket watch,

grand maw-maw’s crochet, photographs of fatal surgery

and their collections of foreign songs and feathered wings

I see ankles finer than madness

shoulders greyer than pearl

mouths rouged with pinot noir

thighs as thin as poppets

earrings strung out on clotheslines

and patience as short

as Pepin the dwarf in the vaudeville next door.

I have seen the starry dome crack itself to let in moonlight and rain.

Reid Mitchell is a New Orleanian living in Quanzhou, China. His poems have been published in numerous journals, including Pedestal, In Posse, Softblow, and Cha, where he is currently guest poetry editor. Mitchell's novel A Man Under Authority was published by Turtle Point Press. He frequently writes with Hong Kong poet Tammy Ho.

New Poetry From Richard Cronshey

Between Hank Williams and John Donne The Shadow Falls
And I Am The Shadow

Today I past you on the street
and my heart whose matter is soon spent
in you shall burn
the world. I can’t help it, I
am still not good, not bad, my heart
belonging
to no one does not belong to me.
If my life got wasted by you
smoked up
in your life, that would be
a kind of victory for me,
a birthing into my own petrified
destiny or burning essence.
In this world I’m left to wander
Wondering through this world alone
When blossoms unfold
A plaything
Alone and forsaken
With sad madness and gimpy legs
Poor as dirt through slow motion years
On property that had been mine
If I hadn’t fathered that bastard
Doppelganger
Illegally with a bunch of outlaw
Metaphors upon virgin earth
And thereby jinxed shitless me..
The venom of all stepdames, gamsters gall
That I may know, and see your milky bright
Sillouette, but you send back my eyeballs
And celestial pump, No Longer at
This Address and this is the midnight
Of my life’s embarrassing year.
Oh where has it gone to, my leg,
My life smiling on me?

A hound in the distance is starting to bey.
Now a pair of chaoses and a lot of absence
Frequent me, an abysmall distillation
Looks me up and down. The world’s
Whole sap is sunk., Bayou Pon Pon.
O Sweet Marie she’ll dance. The hydroptique
Earth has drunk, and everybody’s having fun
But me. Lord I don’t know how
To lose all others, from all things
For I am every dead thing.
To make the doubt clear I tried
And I tried to make her satisfied.
I’m nobody’s sugar daddy now.
There you are folks.
If the good lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
The heavens get off on moving.
Pleasure’s not pleasure
If you don’t spread it around.
The sun in its radiant chair
Isn’t greedy with the heat and lordy neither
Will I be, sister subjection think these things cheerfully
Restless on the farm. Don’t take your guns to town
Son and make a spirit feare .
These stars are so many beads strung
On a single speeding string as is the pith
Whose quick succession makes it still
One thing. To pass an age
In her in whose body
This low world gets up and runs.
So hep your brother along the road, Terese,
Anette and Jole Blon. They have a good time,
O yes, oui, oui. But what good would it do.
I know I’d still want you.

The hogs took the cholera.
This must, my soul, be the long and short of it
To go on overthinking the thing and remembering
Her body that was the opposite of jail to me. I’m dirt
And you’re the ocean of loss
Invironning all and gnawing and breaking
My banks. Thanks a lot. Nothing but me
Of all invenom’d things
Blackmailed by my appetites
Am a decoy recanting death. I take up porcelain
Where they buried clay and usurpe
The body as the sea which
When it gets also sheds you numerlesse
Infinities tis late to ask abundance
Of your grace. See how the sun’s
Headlong conflagration begets
Strange creatures in Bayou Pon Pon?
In me your fatherly yet annoying ryme
Has wrought the same contamination.
Why don’t you spark me
Like you used to do?


Richard Cronshey was born in Los Angeles in 1966. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including most recently The Snow and The Snow. Cronshey's poems have appeared previously in Zone.

Raymond Federman

15 May 1928 - 6 October 2009

Jim Carroll

1 August 1950 - 11 September 2009

Five Poems From Michael Graber

Instructions for Making Love to a Goddess

Prepare for months before entering her
chamber: fast, do body work, drink pure
fruit juices. This is an altar, so be humble
or be humiliated by her shriveling pranks.
She knows what takes you to your knees.
Wait until she unties her hair before you
unbutton her blouse. Did you remember
to consecrate the encounter with a gift?
Listen with your hands. Scan her body for
parts too long untouched. Stay in the space
between total surrender and discipline.
Don’t be scared to ask her what feels good.
When she laughs, you will stagger, drunk.
The music her body makes sounds like
the world’s oldest hatreds and freshest
healings, waking the dead from trance.
As for speed, interpret your instructions
from the river. Be as intimate as food
in fire. With the ache of birthing, repeat
her name aloud as a mantra. If you’ve
gotten this far, your life has changed
shape and you awake in a country
where judges, sheiks and rabbis, even
dollars have no authority. The poem
you write must stand on its own. Yet,
you cannot sit for long after light breaks
your being. Here, you master patience.
Like a boat tethered to a pier, you are
tied to this dance the length
of her infinite satisfaction.


Longing

I.          When you see the wet hair and swimming-
toned torso the way of water no longer
makes sense. One glance and sailors
moan for shipwreck. Most desire drowning,
yet I would live to discover a new land
on my native shore.
                                     When the fever beads
dried I could not explain how a mermaid
blew the grace of breath into me, how she
lulled me to sleep with her underwater laugh.
I blinked. She lay in my bed. Her shapely,
human legs wrapped around my body
like a wave. She laughed the same laugh,
explained “I survived the molting by licking
dried saltwater off your beard.” I was shaved
clean.

II.                                This legend. This acorn. This story—
a seed in a hard shell. One nibble on the neck
and the shell cracks open. A kiss and a single
green sprout announces its birth. Another
nibble and rings grow inside the oak.

III.           I wake up walking an old growth forest trail.
I pause to get grounded. I know this place,
its idioms and shapes know me. If this is the land
of love, may I learn its language and taste
homecoming in its tongue? If this is the land
of the living, I could die almost satisfied.


Leave Your Longing Open

My children, here is a secret
that cannot sit still. Your father
is a collection of ecstatic particles
held with great gobs of glue, called

love. One foot dances in another
stream of conversation that travels
faster than light. I have been alone
so long in the televised world,

breaking acorn shells so oak roots
can sabotage the satellites’ signals
and leaves can grow through the
slight crack of your smart phone

to remind you how to listen. Slow
down and leave your longing open.


Shadows on the Cave Wall

When they took off the blindfold I saw
all I would embrace years from then. Fear
engenders fantasy, and stories get told for
lesser purposes of help or healing, so I noticed
only the darker ones twirling. A door that really
wasn’t there was locked with lead. The dark robes
danced and their masks looked like my neighbors—
lawyers, merger-and-acquisition matchmakers, ex
in-laws, smirks of those seduced and those who seduced,
falling faces caught in compromises that cost almost as much as
peak performance, future mistakes I could not learn from
before kissing you. Shaking at the mouth of the cave, all
the lies I ever told paraded in the shadow the fire casts. My life
followed this snake of sound where the flute chased the strings
around the meandering drum beats. Dark from five days rain,
I did not know what I might back into, but it was better
than stammering at a threshold I was not ready
to cross. I backed into a brook and drowned.
Reborn by mouth-to-mouth breath,
so little separates us from living.


Let’s Go Say Hi to the River

Our footprints may take the wind
a few days to mend. The mud slows
down our pace because life takes off
faster here and you must trudge to soak
it in. O lover, spread our blanket. Let me
fall before I slide down the bank. If you
listen, you can hear the waterlogged souls
who drowned nearby and the warbled,
falsetto howls of the teenager hanging
from the old train bridge by one arm.
Behind us two people married, but not
to each another, grope in frenzy as if
speed enhances bliss. Here, by the oak
with a face in its bark, you and I move
with the understanding the river has
with the land that cradles it; its soil
enriched by the same flowing waters.
Life abounds where the Mississippi bends.
The sun turns our flesh pink, another lesson
where a little heals but too much might
be dangerous. We kiss and the river responds.
Its current pours through us. In the rush
the earth asks us to exchange vows.
We accept. The river melds our names,
our blood, our tribes. To pay creation’s
priest for the ceremony, we offer our lives.
Deal, echoes the woods, now abandon your plans,
risk everything to sing the song you just heard.


Michael Graber is the author of The Last Real Medicine Show. Since September 11th, 2001 he has chosen to write only love poetry. Graber runs the Southern Growth Studio, lives in Oxford, MS, and plays mandolin with the Memphis band, the Bluff City Backsliders.

Carol Gunther

2 June 1954 - 4 July 2009

New Poetry From Andrew Baron

Zone, Happy Anniversary

Not of marriage, because what’s that?
There’s a new space         (this one, ours)
born of new age.     So happy

here,

together.

The managers would have us earn it,
nurse us on their image then
chain us to a corner of their freedom.

Fuck them.     The only
image is a pulse
keeps this in motion,
beats our distances
into days around no vein.          May

this stay
a city with no center

and happy spread the plague up to the gates.



Andrew Baron's poems have appeared previously in Zone. He lives in Portland, Oregon.