Dragonfly Earrings for Betty

‘A gift for you should not be vulgar,
I paint for you bamboo in the wind.
Just listen to the sound of the topmost branches,
Is it the wind or someone weeping?'
Hsu Wei

That eye you poked with a stick
is now as blue as a forget-me-not,
a disk of dissolving blue
(the good eye is hazel).

‘Who did it?' they asked. ‘I did,'
you laughed, and they believed you
(impossible not to perceive
your impossible honesty).

At thirteen, your teeth were plucked;
At thirty-one, your hair fell out.
Lung cancer, three hernias, an infection
that rages as you stalk through China .

Your wig is always groomed
like Robespierre's or Lord Melbourne's,
auburn tastefully streaked with grey;
your mission in Beijing is to buy a new one.

‘You walk as if you own half the world,'
a friend said. ‘And are about to buy the rest.'
It's a walk half like an athlete,
half like a croupier at the end of a shift.

We smoke furiously into the dusk,
chatting about men & children,
the population of China & its gardens,
talk that grows into something like love.

I'll send you the earrings you liked,
three dragonflies in chandelier
bronze sparked with crystals,
mauve, watermelon, pink & green.

They really do glint like dragonflies
hovering over a lotus pond
or fireflies contouring the dark.
They'll sit well near your shoulder

and your dog will surely notice them.
Silently they shiver,
breaking into honeyed lights. And yet
I still hear the sound of someone weeping.

Great Wall Wine, Hangzhou

‘Our eyes follow, slope after slope,
                        and we understand
How it ate up the dragon hearts of our grandfathers.
And in the end they built it for whom?
            For the benefit of what clan?'
Na-lan Hsing-te

‘The universe survives the affairs long past;
The ruined foundation lies hidden by brushwood.
Till now the bones of corvee labourers
Still weep in the wind and sandstorm,'
Chu Ch'ing-yu

I

The Great Wall clambers across the label,
      an impossibly long, blundering insect,
            the bricks blurred, the crest dissolving,
                        the window embrasures eaten by cloud,
                  the watch-towers like bottle-stoppers, all
      rather faint as if no one believed the wall existed
or perhaps wished it never existed;

and yet it lasts, a gap-toothed symbol of the lunacy
      of human affairs, the rough-edged enmities, the only
            half-malign intentions, mistakes disguised as triumphs,
                  evil clothed in mandarin-duck-coloured satins;
            it's the image we have of the Great Wall,
      great, wall-like, invincible, frightening to all,
a universal emblem of the will to suffer.

On maps it's different; there are segments
      like broken false teeth, built without clear logic,
            Long Walls of the Wei, Qi, Zhao and Yan,
                        tyrants protected their domains, kept subjects
                  corralled, slaves crushed, barbarians crowned;
            walling obsessed them and yet they never,
not once, considered the real purpose of a wall;

least of all Shi huangdi who buried scholars
      burnt books, razed the Long Walls,
            made the Great Wall to keep the nation intact,
                        then turned to the search for immortality
                  anciently located at Peng Lai (his delegation
            never returned, assumed to have perished);
and all he left was a blade-lipped slave army & a vast tomb

with his own mausoleum at the core
      bounded by quicksilver rivers that knotted into a pure silver sea,
            milky & chameleon that coursed in massive orbs
                  breaching banks, swamping treasures; no one saw
            his body floating twig-like on that sea of mercury
      (it was his last stab at becoming immortal).
And the Great Wall still promised to repel devils & invaders.

‘With mercury the various waterways of the Empire, the Yangzi
and Yellow Rivers, and even the great ocean itself were created
and made to flow and circulate mechanically… Lamps were
fuelled with whale oil so that they might burn forever without
being extinguished.'
Sima Qian Historical Records

‘What can Emperor Qin Shihuang brag about? He only killed
460 Confucian scholars, but we killed 46,000 intellectuals.'
Mao Zedong

II

‘Better get drunk
And sleep –
Let the sun stage the rise and fall of an empire;
I just pretend I know nothing about it.'
Chang Yang-hao

‘Since of old there have been white bones in the yellow sands.
Where the Ch'in built a wall to keep out the Tartars,
The Han still light a beacon fire.
Beacon fires are lit without cease,
And the fighting goes on without end.'
Li Po

A lie became the truth; the reasoning
wasn't all that clear, but some of the finest results
come from lack of certainty, so the wall swelled

into a god that was a demon or the other way
round, an excuse and a rationale; without the wall
reality lost centre, contours, density, being.

I don't like writing in abstracts, the brain
is too fleshly, looping in mauve coils,
curving in coral recesses, rising in milky polyps.

My wall has been made & deconstructed
over & over, using vermilion & verdigris,
indigo & brown, blood & flesh colour,

scored with hieroglyphs & expletives,
capped by animal & flower figures in clay,
foundations kept repaired month by month;

even then it could hardly be called great
though it was far from an apology for a wall,
being quite original and built like a laddered hive,

a ziggurat, labyrinth or even a copy of a wall,
it could change shape like a ghost or an amoeba.
That wall was almost human even to its voice.

III

‘painted skiff with a load of wine, and West Lake's good…
when lotus opens, West Lake's good.
just come with wine.'
Ou-yang Hsiu

‘The fisherman's drunk,
His straw coat dances…
He laughs at the human world, both past and present.'
Su Shih

‘When drunk, pin flowers on the hat and wear it upside down!'
Huang T'ing-chien

The wine is almost good, licorice-coloured,
      floss-textured, ripe-scented, not unexpectedly
            for the nation has a wine tradition
                  great as the Great Wall. Poets especially
            paid homage to the joy & ruin
      of raw wine (to be literary & teetotal was exceptional)
Ou-yang Hsiu, Yen Chi-tao, Su Shih, Kuan Han-ch'ing…

Convivially they loitered over wine-cups streams, almost hoping
      their couplets would fail to form, leaving them bound
            to drink deep of the penal cup, otherwise adding to the vast
                  library of anthologies on the matter of wine.
            Leeks are ready to cut, red-lotus & long-waisted rice are boiling;
      but in kingfisher halls, wine-cups shaking in their hands,
white-heads lean on one another like stooks of wheat.

Mostly even so they drank alone, maundering
      in thatched cottages while camellia petals
            drowned in the snow, dipping oars shaped like magnolias
                  over jade waterways where the moon wobbled
            waiting to be scooped up & gulped down,
      dancing with their shadows, laughing ha ha ha,
lying under willows & pear trees.

Dressed in thin red silk, her face peony-flushed,
      Li Ch'ing-chao drank wine in an arbor with her husband;
            they picked plum blossoms in the snow,
                  duelled with blades of grass & strayed into lotus-beds
            ‘thrashing through' & startling herons;
      afterwards she slept late, burrowing into her jade pillow
murmuring ‘still: I hold onto a moment of time.'

IV

‘In this desolate vastness I have heard the sighs of ancient
warriors,and the rumble of the chariots of war racing
towards me from across the Gobi, banners fluttering in the
wind. Everyone knows that science says there are no ghosts,
but I have really heard them and seen things.'
Cao Hai, former head of the Jade Gate Pass Cultural Heritage
Protection Office

The breath of spring missed the ‘earth dragon' wall
but everything else of value went that way:
oak galls from Persia, black salt from Kapisa,
white felt from the Ordos, Samadhi wine,
(the purple camels wept & drank their own tears
while the yellow hounds drooled over the shifting sands)

damask, fish sauce & filagree from Byzantium,
purple dye & coral from the Tyrrhenian Sea,
asbestos cloth for dance mats, dark-green fish pendants,
(the wild sheep circled the salt flats & were gorged by wolves
& only the water-wagtail sang, almost as soft as silence,
while gold hexagrams & gold-digging ants scored the river beds)

porcelain incised with spells & silk in mermaid hues,
clouded brocade & paper narcissi, Persian spotted dogs,
&, not least, mare's teat grapes from the Khocho oasis.
Some of the merchants were figments & ghosts
watching their spiritual affairs from beyond the firelight,
just as their customers were, without comedy

or guile; only the quicksilver toads danced in the dark
through tamarisk, reeds & licorice plant
around the salt-crystalled swamps of Lop Nor lake.
Naturally death happened & the mummies became immortal,
the basket of fried dumplings waits to be opened,
the blue-hatted baby rests beside his sheep's udder bottle.

An enterprise at first strictly commercial
became a spiritual matter, a contest with the abstract
in which all that was concrete lost outline;
the ‘floating souls' of the army left their mark
in Han bamboo slips that signalled their name & rank
& bones too broken even for divination.

The kitchen of the Han soldiers was scrubbed clean & painted
black, yellow, over & over as if to appease their absent wives
or to blot out invisible writing; otherwise they waited,
eyeballing wolves, dancing with scorpions,
longing to eat blistered camel meat with barbarians;
the spies & soothsayers ran caterwauling into the abyss.

‘The Long Wall is propped upon yellow sands and whitened bones.
We have inscribed our achievements on the mountains of Mongolia,
But the land lies deserted, the moon shines for no one.'
From Zhongguo lidai changcheng shi lu ( Poetry of the Great Wall
of China throughout the Ages )

In the tradition of raw solitude linked with the Pass
the fences between the real & unreal melted away,
memory was subsumed by the metaphor;
barbarians they never saw but heard them in the void
as voluble as themselves; their complaints were
mild, mellifluous, even pleading, almost flute-like -

it was easy to turn mystical, to make maps of Peng Lai,
to forget that thirteen towns once stood on thirteen rivers;
at Loulan lives were left behind in the form of red lintels
& railings, gazelle-shaped bixies & viridian chests.
No one goes to Lop Nor now except nuclear scientists
who find nothing but the hungry spirits to harry.

Seven years ago the road came to Jade Gate Pass,
along with tourists in Hummers & Land Rovers,
pilgrims with back-packs, pony tails & lofty words,
searching for themselves or what they might have been,
historians who stayed a day; all left with new illusions,
& ‘The First Pass Under Heaven' & the Gobi gave up nothing.

‘Houses, towers, walls, gardens, roads… the habitat of Death
And Silence.'
Sven Hedin

‘not a word is heard from the Jade Pass'
Wen T'ing-yun

V

‘This year my luck runs afoul –
      Dismissed from office, I didn't do well with wine either'
Ch'ien Ch'ien-yi

      ‘Who will see my drunken dance
But the flowers that fill my silk cap and the moon that fills my cup.'
Chu Tun-ju

Next year or so they'll do a new label,
making the wall less ghostly, with no hint
of the yellow springs & the white foxes,
nothing of Mount Scorched & River Coldhot,
nothing of ‘the clothes bag of one Lu Dingshi'
nothing of the slip inscribed
            ‘Fourteen people died on the 20th day
            in the intercalary month in the bingzi year',
no scraps of Shantung silk,
none of the skulls turned into drinking cups
or Biographies of Eminent Women
(no one's weeping)
& the voices & flutes that can't be heard or stopped, instead a format
                        showing distinctly the wall's best features:
                        ‘The Tower For Receiving Distant Nations'
                        ‘The Gate To Glorious Civilisation'
                        ‘The Terrace For Airing Horses'
                        & naturally (no one's weeping)
                        ‘The First Pass Under Heaven'

& perhaps for a happy touch
      the horses of Emperor Xuanzong dancing with cups of wine
            in their mouths & the girl nomad on her bright-kneed mount,

            while lurking in the label's corner there'll be
                        ladles of clove-smelling carnation-smelling wine
                        dribbling down the kingfisher jackets
                                                            of poets
                        lying beneath paulownia & wistaria
                        & dreaming of the black hurricanes
                        ha ha ha

(no one's weeping)

‘When wine is gone, the moon suddenly disappears,
But in Heaven, eternally, it lives on.'
Shen Chou