English

(Chung-lü-tiao, mu-yang-kuan )

The clouds came restlessly and went
Only a little rising moon appeared.
Unguessably wicked were Hung-hsin's plans.
He waited there for Liu Chih-yüan
As slowly the hour deepened into late night.
A short time after the watchman's second drum
A fresh wind blew upon men's cheeks.

The wall was tumbled on the northwest side
And suddenly, there, appeared another hero.
He leaped the ruined wall as nimble as could be
And poised to run to the thatched hut.
Hung-yi was delighted.

( AFTER AN EVENING SPENT IN READING THE BIG BOYS )

HONEYMOON

Ponder, darling, these busted statues,
Be aware of the forum, sweet;
Feel the centuries tearing at youse —
Don't keep asking me when we eat!

Look, my love, where the hills hang drowsy;
Caesar watched them, a-wondering, here.
Get yon goddesses, chipped and lousy —
Don't be trying to bite my ear!

And with what stern conscience, honest fellows,
The lifelike dead their living lives reclaim! No pleasantries!
But not so that goddess by whose wit and patronage
They cry unchallenged their mournful ecstasies:
A gay rogue, she!
Who would believe, under the tall sombre folds,
A toying inner creature, mind and mischief
Of the gigantic all-ghoul, Death?
Cat-seeming, in lazy thought-games tangled
While the rats teem, children of sterile breed —
Little difference, be they caught or spared.
Ah, the divine tact and felinity

When the long freaks of light (new time still somewhere)
Reach into memory like fresh morning icicles,
The dead shiver between hot and cold,
Find their marked places in the grateful crypt
Where lying still decides all feeling well or ill.
Under the feverish snow of sudden day,
Stony refuge from the sun's maddening prophecy
Of instantaneousness (life to the living
But to the dead, death again, false pang) —
A crypt, darkened by daylight heavily,
Keeps death in snowy hiding obdurate
To the long icicles of memory

On notable days the dead mount a mighty table,
A barque that sails their world from one end to the other,
But which they rarely look to, since never falls to them
Extreme occasions fit to make joy and revel of.
Wherefore the table sails as might a magic barque
Riding a vacant sea — the garbled flow
Of sham regrets: for the dead cannot well utter
Precise passions, or call their wants by name.
And yet such notable days betide, to celebrate
Unlikely, clouded raptures, brazenly enigmatic.

At night a city narrows into a populous cafe.
At night the city of the dead becomes a shrunken framework
Into which pour mincingly those uninspired wanderers.
All are but apathetic game-automata now.
The foppish trimmings, the wasted spangle of ball and ballet —
Such hang in brazen melancholy on the walls,
Like the fond sketches of habitues bygone
Immortalizing bouts of myopic tenderness.
But here the guests are not warm students of the glass,
Nor do they dote upon the management
Or wage profoundly the cult of the bar-girl.

Within the city merrily rage such grotesque horrors
As might be guessed: the tangled nerves of the dead
Run lunatic there, like evil spirits self-baffled,
Crying vengeance on themselves. A tangle of no consequence:
There is no logic in this world, no justice bargained,
But, by the same rule, no one is tender in his flesh or right.
All's a wild fraud there, the city a grim caprice.
The febrile fragments which animate the tombs
Form one electric brain, inside of which the surgical eye
Discerns the dolesome city that I tell of.

Above the grove where Amulette and Unidor make play,
Resting among the tree-tops like a cardboard cottage,
Stands their deathly dwelling — an absurd household it is!
Unidor is already up: it is he who builds
The large chimera-city in whose shadow
Their modest covert is safe from outer jangle
And yet not brutish — like any self-respecting family residence.
Unidor cares little what comes to pass within the city,
Enough that there's a city in the distance to be seen —
To Amulette the thing's great fun, not really boring.

Romanzel through deep heights rises: not to the sky.
In death no air like that soft earth-blue whose hollow climates
Poets long filled with secret universes
Where truth in plaintive multiple was not itself —
A mountainous oppression is the sky of Romanzel.
It weighs upon him low and cloudily,
The too-sweet, plenary oxygen of suicide —
Till he's so many several demon-satyrs
Leaping in frolicsome despair from peak to peak.
And always, impossibly below, framed in a dance
Half-lewd, half-paradisial — dear Amulette,

Surely is Mortjoy of the luckiest.
Just think: a theatre all his own!
And there he rules, Prince of the Play,
A solitary monarch set up in papier mâche ,
Perpetual fixture of the Royal Box:
No need to saunter out in search of vassalage
Or the rare shows secreted from all eyes but his —
The lasting eyes, unblinking, of curiosity.
To his side come running the lost little wonders
That fell out of life, it seemed, into a giant nothing-hole —
The same that swallowed out of sight
The extra numbers on the clock