from Issue #8: Poetry by Lu Ye, translated by Ouyang Yu

Photo (CC) reurinkjan @ Flickr

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The Girl Students’ Dormitory

In fact, a girl students’ dormitory is equivalent
To a boudoir in ancient times
If they study in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature
It’s more like a Xiaoxiang Guan or Hengwu Garden

The clothes and skirts, out to dry, are full of youth
Coaxed as much as nourished by the sun
In the shade of the locust tree downstairs there always stands a boy
Looking lost, like Jia Baoyu or Zhang Junrui
The window, with a wind bell hanging, is upheld by the pious eye
Like the pagoda in the sacred revolutionary place
The last stop to love, like
An outpost position

Like debts, there is a heap of pen-notes to make on the desk
That darkens the good days with shadows
Desk holes stuffed with lipstick bought with meal savings
Pittance of tax paid to beauty
Print bed sheets spread with large acres of fresh flowers
In which serendipity hides, like bees
The stockings, over the bed rails, are lazy, ostentatiously coquettish
A dress with sad colours is in abnormal menstruation
A cloth doll is more stunning than her owner
The little speckles on its face have an antique feel
A diary, secretively, is harbouring amorous thoughts underneath the pillow
A red plum branch sticking out of its hardcover
And there is an envelope, just sealed, that looks as solemn
As a carefully furnished room

Like those who love beauty more than landscape
They love chocolate more than shape
Whenever they read they crack spicy melon seeds
Faster and more accurate than their reading
And they are ready to crack open their bodies
The way they crack the seeds
When they have too many instant noodles they smell of soap
Their shelf-life, like love, is no longer than six months
And the wildest love is no more than
Suffering migraines whose side-products are
Poetry and prose, of the whimpering and whinging kind

When time, as chewy as chewing gum, is not consumed
Something else must happen, something else must be extracted
From the rose that is youth
In the most critical moment
It would be best to fall ill, as ill as Xi Shi
For love, like revolution in nature
Wins where the linkage is at its weakest
Bodywise and heartwise

Here, everyone plays the leading role herself
In the film that is life
And treats the attentions of a boy as the Oscar
God has awarded her

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The Nunnery

Life, like this nunnery
Has days that are no different from one another
It ends even before it is lived
The flowers outside open and fall, and fall and open
The trees behind the house green and yellow, and yellow and green
Even a small grass flashes her fashion
But I, the colour of blue brick and grey tile
Deteriorate and go moldy because of the long imprisonment of the aroma in
…………..my bone marrow

Locked inside a tiny niche
I, illegally, sleep with desire and morality, swallowing each others’ innards
The drum and evening bell execute days and nights
The beautiful holidays, that have breathed their last, resemble the roses,
…………..uprooted in the spring
Never believing in resurrection
The classics look like a coffin shop, as calculating as a mouth organ,
…………..punched everywhere with holes
Its thickness just enough to trip the lightest steps

I live but I have parted company with life
My character more desolate than the embroidered cliff
My body more serious than the dead branches
My expression no better than a slate of bluestone, where no moss gathers
And, in the hollow of my arms that reflects the fields
One feels the non-existence of air

However, a jug, sometimes empty and sometimes full, somehow shows
A face many years ago
Its smile, framed with fire, like a secret code that erases its traces from the
…………..dusty world
Flickers in the water
The mute wooden fish is sorrowing
And, looking for the recovery of knocked time, intends to swim away

Look, the yeast of dream needs little
To swell the heart
An idea, like an incandescent bulb, rushes from quietude
To quietude, like screaming rats, an ominous sound bouncing back from the
…………..southern wall

How I admire the bunch of plum flowers by the window, born in the
…………..morning and dying at dusk
Its soul as tender as a white handkerchief
I do not know what love is; I have not written honeyed words
But I shall keep a post-life letter
And my will one day break the sky, as hidden as an illegitimate child

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Making a Coffin

People were busy making a coffin
Death was fresh
With a clear fragrance of wood chips and shavings
My grandfather, just dead, lay inside the house
He, I believe, must have heard
The sawing of the wood and the hammering of the nails outside

At the same time when I felt
That there was a large white flower opening, quietly, in the air

The sunlight everywhere, seemingly generous enough
I was walking in the courtyard
I, was, still, alive,
My viscera intact
Desiring to seek pleasure, for love alone

The makers of the coffin, I was hoping, should reduce the noise to a
minimum
As I did not want the person inside the house to hear this
Unlucky noise
He might have got upset
Perhaps he was only assuming that he was taking a nap
And would wake up in a little while
When he would push the window open and raise his head
Towards the sky in order to observe the direction of the wind

There was a large white flower
Opening, quietly, in the air

I was wondering what
To be placed inside the coffin
A tape-recorder with a tape of Lü Opera
An asthma gas spray, a cloth tiger
A woolen hat and a set of dentures
There were just so many to put in
I didn’t want to include the person

The large white flower in the air
Was becoming larger, and lighter

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ABOUT THE POET AND TRANSLATOR

LU YE is a Chinese poet born in December 1969. She has published a number of poetry collections, such as feng shenglai jiu meiyou jia (Wind is Born Homeless), xin shi yijia fengche (Heart is a Windmill) and wode zixu zhi zhen wuyou zhi xiang (My Non-existent Home Town). She has also published 5 novels, including xingfu shi you de (There was Happiness) and xiawu dudianzhong (Five in the Afternoon). She has won a number of poetry awards, including People’s Literature Award in 2011. She now teaches at Jinan University, China.

Since his arrival in Australia in 1991, OUYANG YU has published 73 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literary translation and criticism in both English and Chinese. His latest novel in Chinese is Taojin Di (Land of Gold Diggers), published by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House in 2014 and his latest novel in English is Diary of a Naked Official, published by Transit Lounge in 2014. His latest translation into Chinese is The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, published by Nanjing University Press in 2014. He is now professor of English at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics.

from Issue #8: Poetry by Kerrin P. Sharpe

Photo (CC) steve p2008 @ Flickr

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to qualify as a search diver

she releases her hair
plants candles in the sea

grows fins of broom
and toi-toi imagines

her husband on a shore-line
somewhere say bay head beach

his thin face shaved
by small tongues of spume

imagines him the complete
angler with the anatomy

of a salmon imagines
how sirens of krill

tow his dinghy the mad hun
into a sound drowned valley

so the road home never darkens

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to see Venice you only need a mask

even though Turner’s mask
was a thin wash of lilac rain
the artist always longed
to set fire to Venice

at first he dragged
undiluted paint across paper
then scratched out
any impression of water

his father known
for his spare ribs
remembers the smoke of stars
strokes of people
luminous hollow hair

refugees of Venetian history
doctors who didn’t quack
doges horologists glassblowers
became flames of tonal lilac

there was no need
to add body colour
Venice was an inferno
and what his painting forgave
from this fusion of embers

remained behind
the confessional grille
with the lilac Priest

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photos of Raymond

though there are photos
of Raymond’s academic
surgery and lab gowns

he still shouted doctor
when he discovered
his son in the pool

though Raymond gave us a fridge
an unknown illness
still swallowed his wife

there are photos of Raymond
at the cemetery
with 100 blue moon roses

the morning my mother
couldn’t wake Raymond
I dreamt there were photos

of all his pills
on polka-dot saucers
whenever I think

of Raymond’s photos
there’s always a blackbird
I call the doctor

at my window

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ABOUT THE POET

KERRIN P. SHARPE’s first book, three days in a wishing well, was published by Victoria University Press in 2012. A group of her poems also appeared in Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet).  A second book, there’s a medical name for this, was published by Victoria University Press in 2014. At present, she is completing her third collection, rabbit rabbit, with the assistance of a Creative New Zealand grant. Kerrin lived for many years in Wellington, New Zealand, where she completed the Victoria University course (IML) in creative writing. She now lives in Christchurch and, as well as writing herself, teaches creative writing. Her students have had many writing successes and she is very proud of them all.

from Issue #8: Poetry by Elias Greig

Photo (CC) russellstreet @ Flickr

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White houses

I saw it through the windows as a child –
…..Some fine, well-founded house
…..Placed high: on an embankment,
…..Over a green hill where
…..the clouds rest easy,
…..and the sun spreads it hands.
I’d be walking past with my schoolbag
…..And look up, always up.

Some grace note would sound –
…..A wind chime, a fresh breeze
…..Through neat European trees,
…..And I’d be mourning it:
…..The sense of cleanly purpose,
…..The door opening on an impossible decency.
Where else does longing start but in mistaking
…..Something strange for something lost?

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A Tall Man’s Prayer

Lord, let me not fall
…..Crookedly into place–
Rather keep me upright.
Let my tall shadow fall
…..Evenly in all weathers.
My legs keep limber,
My knees well-hinged,
And my long back straight–
…..Keep it a ladder of bones.
If I must bend with age
Let that bending be easy–
Let it be bending
…..Truly – not stooping.

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ABOUT THE POET

ELIAS GREIG is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. His research focusses on the link between poetic and political representation in the early work of William Wordsworth. Other research interests include William Hazlitt, Mary Wollstonecraft, British Radicalism in the 1790s, and Robert Burns. He has discussed Romantic Literature on ABC radio, reviewed theatre for The Conversation, and is the Postgraduate Representative for the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA). All these achievements have been funded by over ten years of casual work: in retail, as a shoe salesman, and, most recently, bookseller; in academia, as a casual lecturer and tutor at the University of Sydney, and, most recently, casual marker at several universities across Australia. Of these occupations, shoes pay best, books worst, and marking is by far the most unpleasant.

from Issue #8: Poetry by Geng Xiang, translated by Ouyang Yu

Photo (CC) Victoria Reay

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An Account of Beilin or the Forest of Stone Steles

A hand-made brush
And an ingot of hand-ground ink, a deep breathing thousand years long
Left on a heap of stones, yinly or yangly
By a group of Chinese characters
Collectively dancing

Only the power of the sunlight
Could bind and lay out the Chang’an book of heard hearts
In black and white, along the rough edges of time
And, drifting among them, under whose wind-calling pen
Was the shadow behind a dynasty copied in such a way
That clouds spread and curled? Accompanying an ancient locust tree
Written in the calligraphic style of Li, and before The Ode to the Stone Gate
I watched and listened

Tell the Forest of Stone Steles that you have to put your footsteps
Inside its long corridor and your eye
On its forehead
Before you know the poems free in brushes and ink, collected by Chang’an
And it is the Chinese characters crowded with stones that make me show
The sharps of humanity
In heresy or crevices. Now, my question to the hands
That have touched the stones in the country: will you dare
Touch another kind of stone?

Leaning against a stone stele, I, in the thousand-year-long
Breathings, in black and white, of the brushes and the ink, have heard the history
Also standing in front of a volume of rivers and mountains, starting to grind the ink
Wetting the brush and moving the air

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An Account of the Terracotta Soldiers and Horses

Mud and flame, across the most pictographic memory
Of the Chinese characters, have quietly sent a crowd of people
Risen from the yellow earth back to the yellow earth

Mud is standing in the muddy earth
As flame gets under the skin of the mud’s breathings
The way paintings of the battlefield are hidden in one
The way a wound, thousands of years long, fits the busy rural fields
Instead, an onlooker has seen a mulberry tree
Taking roots by the body of a terracotta soldier
On a mulberry-gathering day, when someone is reminded
Of the touch of silk with skin
Thicker and denser than the armour

And, standing by the crowded pit
I grew fearful of the instigating eyes of the crowd
That might again induce their murderousness. The wheat fields are like the clothes
That give a simple body back to the farmer
The hand holding the sword is taking hold of hand tools
Grabbing hold of a virgin body, lost years ago, as if by the veins of life. Let me kneel
In memory of the Qin people, a grand funeral, of earth

Mud and flame, underneath a plot of wheat field
Have turned thoroughly cold. As the hand caresses the collectively sewn
Terracotta soldiers and horses, with broken limbs, the breath of the Qin people
Hits the face, through the Chinese characters

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An Account of the Great Wild Geese Pagoda

A pagoda like a cloud. All the seasons around
There is a great snow that flutters down the mountains of the Qinling
For whom are you coming, flying? A red mountain gate, reclining in the clear
And solitary sky of Chang’an, tell me
About the features of it left on the earth
When a dynasty far receded

A great dream of the Tang Dynasty. From the much-loving arms
Of an individual, I drew the silk
As if I was drawing an avenue of silk. And in the sound of the shuttling
On the loom, and at the top of the pagoda, filled with the hidden volumes of scriptures
That the great geese had carried there, can the black bricks
turned into the Buddhist shadows
Still sound the 7 notes of Chang’an
Towards the skies? At this moment
I won’t appear on the field although I am willing
To be taken as a listener

As long as I raise my head, the eye, hidden in the pagoda
Or the volumes, will attack me from the gray seams
Of the bricks. It’s one person’s swan-goose song
Who will say, on the plain
Softened by the spreading silks: My Guanzhong
And my pagoda of great geese, resemble a worn
Kasaya, and, more, they resemble a feather
Fallen from a goose in its flight

Let me re-read one clothed in kasaya, from the height
Of your seven notes, with his facial expressions on his way back
From the far distant silk road, his back inserted
Between the pages of those volumes or
Standing under the sky

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The Substitute

What bonds me is the substitute doll
Primitive imagination of rags
Sewn and patched on the collar of my clothes

Prior to my turning 12, there must have been
12 such dolls, growing up
With me, lankily. When I saw them, my heart would grow tense
Contracting like wrinkles of wave, and I’d grab hold of Mother’s
Hands, mysterious ones, that were sewing them
Without daring to stir. In my eyes, brighter than
Fine china, tears were running
Scarily

How much load of illness or disaster did these 12 dolls
Used to bear for me? I am not sure what ferocious ghosts
Caught them and, along with the souls
Dissolved the sins that accompanied my growth. Even less am I sure
On the day when I take off my armour and return to the fields
In which corner of my house
They will rust and erode, filled
With my childhood of witchcraft

The substitute doll, I shall always remember how
I held your cloth body when Mom was asking for my soul
As the heart of my hand kept sweating

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

Born in 1958, GENG XIANG is from Yongshou, Shanxi, and now lives in Xi’an. A member of the Chinese Writers’ Association as well as a leading member of Chinese Poetry Society, he began writing poetry in the 1980s and has had poems published in shikan (Poetry Monthly), shiyue (October) and huacheng (Flower City). In 1991, he attended the Fourth National Young Writers’ Conference and, in the same year, he attended the Ninth ‘Youth Poetry Conference’, held by Poetry Monthly Society, and was a representative at the sixth and seventh Chinese Writers’ Association Representatives Conferences. In 2010, he visited Serbia as part of the Chinese writers’ delegation. He has published eight collections of poetry and essays, including At the Back of Xi’an, Gathering Copper from the People, The Chang’an Book and The Lamp on the Land. He has won the Lao She Award for Essays, the Bing Xin Award for Essays and the Poetry Monthly Annual Award.

Since his arrival in Australia in 1991, OUYANG YU has published 73 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literary translation and criticism in both English and Chinese. His latest novel in Chinese is Taojin Di (Land of Gold Diggers), published by Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House in 2014 and his latest novel in English is Diary of a Naked Official, published by Transit Lounge in 2014. His latest translation into Chinese is The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, published by Nanjing University Press in 2014. He is now professor of English at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics.

from Issue #8: Poetry by Sarah Rice

Photo (CC) Kevin Dinkel @ Flickr

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Breakers

Each wave
before it falls
…………….in a white-wash
…………….of its own decay
aims
I think
to make it …………whole
……………..to shore

not one
ever does

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Indelible

Certain things don’t come out ever.
The blue mould aura in the cracked
ceiling of the bathroom. Bleach,
absence writ large as presence,
in the royal blue tracksuit.

The ring stain on the mattress
of unknown origin, matter, fluid,
lover, that leaves it to be rejected
on the doorstop, even by the Salvos,
despite the knowledge that many
tonight will be sleeping on worse.

Things said to you on the school bus
to which you had no answer.
The discolouration of the bottom lip,
chewed over and over, leaving a tooth-
shaped bite of purple in the flesh.

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Centre

The centre of me moves

…………………………Today for instance
it is that hollow place beneath the ears
where the gland dwells in its jaw cave
Sometimes it is the drumming gut
Sometimes breath
…………………………or a woman
and sometimes
that dark cavern under the ribcage
of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson
…………………………horribly emptied

…………………………At least
these are all the places
at which I can be undone.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SARAH RICE won the 2014 Bruce Dawe poetry prize, co-won the 2011 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, placed third in the 2014 FAW Shoalhaven Literary Awards, and was shortlisted in the 2014 ACU, 2014 Axel Clark, 2013 Montreal, 2013 Tom Howard, 2013 Jean Cecily Drake-Brockman, 2011 CJ Dennis and 2011 Michael Thwaites poetry awards. Her limited-edition art-book of poetry Those Who Travel (prints by Patsy Payne, Ampersand Duck 2010) is held in the NGA as well as other private and public institutions and libraries. Publications include the Global Poetry Anthology 2013, Award Winning Australian Writing and Best Australian Poetry 2012, Long Glances: A Snapshot of new Australian Poetry 2013, Island, Southerly, Australian Poetry Journal, and Australian Book Review (forthcoming).