MA YONGBO

 

 

Watching Water

 

How I wish for more chances to look back

 

not on a whole life, but only the past—

 

as on a train, sitting with my back to the front,

 

watching the landscape tilt and vanish page by page from the window.

 

 

Best to be a slow green leather train,

 

aimless, no destination, no companion,

 

patiently eating a fruit that ripened out of season.

 

 

There are many things you once belonged to,

 

yet they never belonged to you.

 

Sit long enough by the water, and you will begin to flow,

 

while the current, neither increasing nor decreasing, stays where it is.

 

To move forward is to turn back, do not hurry,

 

for you cannot even reach the inside of yourself.

 

 

Once, watching water was the romance of waiting

 

for the tide to ebb and stones to appear,

 

now, you only long to go

 

to the very end of the water,

 

where you can arrive without an oar.

 

Elegy of Perhaps

 

Perhaps, to mourn the dead is to mourn oneself,

 

let the river threading through the eye

 

of a needle flow back to its source.

 

For an existence transcending physical form,

 

an elegy is but an echo of words.

 

It must, from a more hidden spring,

 

claim its flesh and its reason.

 

 

You spent a lifetime kindling every vowel into a lamp,

 

illuminating unnamed things hidden in darkness.

 

I spent half my life carrying language between East and West,

 

Like a weary swift.

 

Yet you long understood: true courage

 

is not endless flight, but the practice of falling—

 

folding one’s wings in every abyss of ambiguity.

 

 

Perhaps I too am torn apart by life, just as you were,

 

one eye smiles, steeped in innocence,

 

the other weeps, drowned in melancholy,

 

between beauty and truth, our poetry runs as undercurrent,

 

shaping the contours of both banks in unseen silence.

 

The river bears its stillness onward,

 

but your silence continues to emit flame and sound.

 

 

Perhaps, to mourn is to cradle one person’s wind and snow

 

into another’s embrace,

 

letting the snow-laden universe sink into quiet once more,

 

and lend fleeting warmth to the frozen earth we share,

 

as for poetry and life, they are no longer matters to debate.

 

 

Perhaps something remains here worth believing in:

 

days unburdened by reckoning,

 

a cold wisdom wrung from snowballs of words,

 

salt scattered across snow, a stranger poet asleep

 

in the snow-white innocence of his childhood.

 

 

A Day At Nanshan Lake

 

 

Nanshan is not the Southern Mountain,

 

nor merely a hill in the south.

 

Facing south while seated north,

 

it is nothing but a fiction of desire.

 

 

When horses are turned loose on Nanshan,

 

they harbour no invented longing.

 

They simply graze at will,

 

along the hillside in late spring.

 

They will not strip the grass bare

 

all the way up to the peak.

 

 

Better to set the horses upon the lake,

 

confined within a slender skiff.

 

 

Lay all those sharp-edged words upon the water too.

 

Let broken weapons sink into sand and silt,

 

and let the lake’s liquid tomb

 

embrace those silver glimmers and fleeting thoughts.

 

Hang the last shard upon an old dark tree;

 

strike it on sleepless nights,

 

to draw forth a calm, unyielding tone.

 

 

We sip tea in the pavilion, chat idly, and breathe the wind,

 

musing on abstract expressionism and its bond with reality.

 

 

Reality may be condensed into the illusion of Nanshan,

 

yet Nanshan can never be restored to a mountain’s true essence.

 

After all,we dwell neither amid Zhongnan’s peaks nor Lushan’s mists.

 

We know not the mountains, nor do we know ourselves.

 

But the mountains know where we come from,

 

and where we are bound to go.

 

 

Walk toward any mountain at random,

 

and it shall walk toward you in return.

 

Be it north or south, whatever its name or height.

 

 

Treat a mountain as a mountain, not a hollow fiction,

 

and we shall return to the darkness of our roots, to sprout anew.

 

We shall see, in the overgrown garden below the hill,

 

an old soul stooping with a stiff waist,

 

gazing far across the surface of the lake.

 

MA YONGBO