At The Great Wall
Poetry and letters/Persist in silence and solitude.
-Du Fu-
When I hit The Wall once more for friendship, and feeling,
I all-the-more sense the ancients’ fears about warfare and winter
And wayfarers traveling through ice-thatched nights or on watch
Along the ramparts, atop parapets, alone and lonely, some exiled,
Some not, their pipe, cup of wine, coarse beige blanket, flimsy notebook
Annotating iceplants owning faint pink buds, barren pepper- and -silktrees,
Seamless inkblot night skies, own cross tempers, lacks of recognition,
And favor, friends and wives absent or dead, most noted by name,
As with Yeats, anon, irregular grey hairs, health issues, lovers, old age,
Wine, wine, infinitely more wine, cris de coeur for spring, and birdsong,
Young girls’ in sundresses, enticing berets and floral hair brocades,
Each detail coming-to-life after each sojourn overland or by sea,
Traversing dicey mountain crevices, en route always elsewhere but home
Before turning back to wherever they began, waiting anxiously at temples,
Travel stations, for the next actual or imagined excursion, ready to record,
Then reorder, fact and fiction, reconnect magic with mundane, naturally,
Long after, while on probable or improbable T’ang or S’ong state missions,
Military maneuvers or reconnaissance ‘ops for border incursions, just demands
Of office or commerce, routine selling of wares, emptiness but gestation, time
For filling up, crafting, inventing detail, this anguish, conveyed of others, crammed
By form, evoking emotion and pain and joy as expressive and hard and mortally cool
As green and white jade to professional touch—, thawing purple-green peach trees,
Egrets roosting on fist-tight baitboxes, arrowroot river blossoms, fried bamboo shoots,
Windowpots leeking onion attar, spooky Li’shan mists, absent infant shoes, ethereal
New Year gold kwai minted from laughing Buddha’s sustainable belly— God/Poet,
Authoring white moments in shudders and glimmers, of things given, things made.
- * * *
Xi-Shi’s Beautiful Great-Great Grandmother
from Xi’an, before it was that, has a small, tight, flat back from springs and autumns
Nesting in her father’s father’s house in Guang-zhou, or flattening high grassland
At Yellow River, not strapping sacks of flour and gaoliang from hot province fields
Past rickshaw coolies to the city hutongs and ghostwall lanes almost every day,
A beauty! they sighed, even with her short black hair spliced in curt, perfect bangs
And dark, stubby, peasant arms, child’s clay face and iron-strong hands un- imperiled
By years of lye and wash and winter ice off Western Mountains where Chung Yang
(Who loved her once) lived, until he fled, butterfly stiffening every other flower,
And surely, for her lost waist and calves, if believed, paired orchid lilies in summer
Thrust, roughcut tubers, after plumrains, but mostly both absent feet, tied at home
By Ba–ba or Jiu-jiu into two acute tiny triangles with thick white muslin wrap,
Uncle binding each ankle and every toe and all other sensible small bones in Xi-Shi’s
Beautiful Great-Great Grandmother’s taut, tiny body into a petite golden lotus.
header photo: "Great Wall" by Travis Wise