Nanluogu Hutong

The alleyway's monotonous grey tone
Has been touched by colorful hues of a small scale flea market.
Here is a puppy vendor, selling mummy dolls.
There is a loopy singer, yelling whammy lyrics.
While two guitar players fondles
The melody of California Hotel,
The fleeting sound dwindles
My desire to stay in Nanluogu Hostel.
In a gloomy autumn afternoon,
My lingering mood measures the frame of the past,
Stretching from a full moon
To the humid east,
As if the pleasant air was crystallized
In a series loving messages,
Page by page, and being digitalized
By sliding doors in various memorial passages.
Centered on it is your whirling new red skirt,
Which bears the searching eyes of pedestrians.
The primitive pattern on your shirt
Creates a dazzling labyrinths,
But you may not know, mon amour,
It is your hair that is the field of my imagination.
One glimpse is enough to see a tiny white butterfly
Gliding though the yellowish bush.
This irregular geometry of psyche is to reply
A long-forgotten letter written in anguish,
Posted to the direction of no-where
Several years ago, with a similar wish
I would have dreamt of here.

The Light and Sweetness

The figure is shaped into an elegant reverse L.
She's looking at something on the ground.
I can imagine the freshness of her face;
I can see hot steam in the public bathroom livening up her skin.
Danger!
You forgot yourself in sketching,
While other women, ugly and earthly, discovered your pencil and papers.
They were yelling at you, beating you,
And dispelling you nakedly out of the bathroom.
That is the story of you,
A simple-minded prostitute
Being transformed into a dedicated painter with your own statement.
Women, all sorts of, nude or not,
Form the central theme of femininity in your painting.
Supple and extravagant in their hips and buttocks,
Tender and confident on their faces,
The strokes are lucid and decisive.
Strangely, such an impression coincides with
The story I read more than 20 years ago,
Which was printed in installment on a local newspaper.
Probably such an installed reading is like a ritual,
With which your life is elevated into a personal growing experience.
Roaming around your painstakingly recuperated paintings,
The radiant images have blurred my eyes.
I know my adolescent imagination
Has been distorted and faded away,
Yet it still retains the light and sweetness
In the confluence of your timeless representations.

(On the occasion of the exhibition of Pan Yuliang's Painting in the Capital Museum)

Flamenco

They say it's about despair and anguish.
But in the convulsion of dancer's body, I see ecstasy and lamentation.
Tattered, sanguine, and a bit churlish,
Movements of hands and legs drip lyrics on the canvass of emotion,
While dazzling rhythms seek the ultimate relish.
Touched by the singer's vehement vocal rendition,
Or carried away by the guitarist's deafening melody;
These moments impart the most thrilling explosion
That comes along with the sudden stillness of the dancer's body.
The unexpected silence in between of sounds,
Like a chasm
Elegantly being sculpted by the dancer's hands,
Captures the glory in its full blossom.
When the voluptuous sound flower
Encounters such a gracious hand stopper,
The rapturous stillness
Has rippled unfathomable sweetness
Across my contemplating mind,
Like a breeze gently stirring a silent pond.

Memory Call

I was called upon on a humid and sultry evening
By a long-time-no-see classmate. Not so excited as I wondered,
How such a reunion would be.
Chit-chat about those acquaintances that no longer see each other?
Or update the irrelevant information about so and so?
Or perhaps, …
Many possibilities appeared, but no one sounded promising.
Still, I cheerfully walked out,
Expecting to see her current face.

Captured on a photo with hallucinating light,
That face once was discreetly slotted in the album
On my way to university.
Occasionally, I would turn to that face and
It would become the source of curiosity among my roommates.
I had lost it for ten years, and
I had never tried to find it
Till that evening.

She was not there yet,
So I sat down idly and waited.
When her voice came over from another end of line,
I couldn't respond it immediately.
Her face was so vague in my mind,
But her silhouette was vivid on the restaurant's window.
'We would not know each other in the street',
She told me so with that familiar broad smile.

Her frankness dismantled the veil of eighteen years,
Immediately brought me back
To the secret garden we once shared, in which
Many idle afternoons were galvanized
By the sweet impulses of our puberty.
Although the boredom of life had claimed her since then,
Our timely meeting
Added nothing but
Blurred my memory of her face.
Alas, the photo I lost ten years ago
Finally found me.

Homage to a Geometrician

Convex piles up convex,
Hyperbolic paraboloids chases another paraboloids,
Columns twists into their double, quadruple, and octet,
All these evocative forms are assembled into
Architectural stanzas, being uttered loudly
By the Geometrician of our time - Antonia Gaudi.
The dictum - ‘Curved lines are perfect’
Commands the absolute obedience of all straight forms.
…
In the labyrinth of curvatures,
On the manifold of equilibrated arches,
Among the twisted pillars and distorted roofs,
There stood Gaudi’s cosmos.
Lofty and sensual,
It fills the void of one’s imagination.
Twisted but mysterious,
It silently mocks straight and lifeless buildings.
…
It overflows; it surpasses; and above all,
It transcends.
Where is that eternal power from?
Gazing at the vortex of these curvatures,
I saw the grimace of the Geometrician.
He is in it.

Dialogue with Pessoa

Courtesy to Richard Zenith for his wonderful translation on the part of Fernando Passoa.

‘Today, I feel bored and uninspired.’
‘Really!? Quite contrary, I feel refreshed today with a shower in bright sunshine, and a walk in a grassland nearby.’
‘Today, I feel apathetic, short on desire.’
‘Well, a dog ran to me while I was walking. Its master, a loner, apologized to me but I forgot to smile as the gesture of acceptance. I laughed at myself while seeing the dog ran away. I feel the spring is coming…’
‘I will write my epitaph: “Here lies Alavro…”
‘You are joking! Life is still a myth to me, and my pleasure has not been exhausted in decoding it.’
‘The Greek Anthology has more apropos.’
‘That’s your desire, isn’t it? I mean the compulsion to write something even you are bored and uninspired.’
‘What’s the reason for these several rhymes?’
‘You can ask H, a bloke who displaces his desire into the austerity of rhyming and a dead language.’
‘No reason.’
‘No reason?’
‘A friend I see from time to time wanted to know what I’m doing these days.’
‘You can send him the words you have just said.’
‘And I write these verses to have something to say.’
‘Do you rhythm?’
‘I rarely rhythm, and rhymes rarely succeed.’
‘Don’t you think rhythm will cripple your creativity?’
‘But sometimes to rhyme is an imperative need.’
‘I reckon you have such an imperative need then?!’
‘My heart goes pop like a paper sack’
‘You mind distills consciousness like a sand pack’
‘Filled with air and given a good smack’
‘Scattered with water and taken a pathetic quack’
‘And the startled stranger turns in confusion’
‘And the bemused friend becomes off emotion’
‘And I end this poem without a conclusion…’
‘And I start this poem with exclusion…’
‘Pop’
‘Hip’
‘…’
‘…’