After three years away from you,
I'm back at last for one day, and more.
We drink green Luling wine this evening
and I see yellow cloth-wrapped books, like when I left.
My sick bones still exist,
so nothing is impossible in this world!
Why bother to plead with the dice,
just throw them and let them roll!

~ Li He (797-817)
Distantly related to the imperial clan and extremely talented,
Li He was nevertheless an unsuccessful scholar who attained
only the lowest posts in his brief life (he died at the age of
twenty-six). His poetry, like that of Meng Jiao, can be bitterly
sarcastic and reflects the frustration he must have felt in his career.
He had a penchant for erotic, romantic, and even morbidly violent
imagery, and his poems grated on the nerves with the shrieking of ghosts,
weeping of flowers, and the burning of sinister fires. He was something
of a Chinese Edgar Allen Poe, though a much better poet than Poe was,
and like Poe, his reputation suffered because literary culture
couldn't stomach his unclassifiable works of genius. Sponsored in his day
by the prominent poet and prose writer Han Yu, Li He quickly
disappeared from literary consciousness after his death, making a comeback
only in the last two centuries. Two hundred forty of his poems have survived
centuries of neglect, though legend states that what remains was part of a larger
collection that was thrown into a toilet by a vindictive cousin.

inside myself
there is a sea where
the moon
is as beautiful
as instant death

climbing stars
have lost their footing
no one can say
what will be lost
in yesterday’s boundless sea

life is a story
filled with typographical errors
neither to be believed
nor denied

software, hardware,
analysis, reason,
astrology, The Book of Changes–all
are useless for knowing
how our lives are arranged–
where we will board the ship,
where we will disembark–

useless for determining
whether those red marks we bear
are scars or birthmarks

love is a letter with no words
containing a whole lifetime
of things thought but never said
sealed in a bottle
bobbing in the sea inside myself

a love poem locked away
in faith that one day
the person for whom it is meant
will read it in my eyes

for Jonah, i will write no tragic history.
the magazines in the library of my heart
are mostly porno or chinese romance.
there are smiles among the broken sharks’ teeth,
a bedroom on fire, incense, ice cubes,
heat, thirst, and lust.

the sky puts out its lights. the sage of love
meditates. there are candles, whole nights
of laughing, ferocious arguments, threats
of suicide. beautiful words,
collected ants, acorns, moss, and lightning.
then love left home carrying a bird
and a branch and a well-honed scottish dirk.

but for you i would write poetry like a nightingale’s cry,
the colors of May, the works of Chopin, a deer’s gait,
a lonely moon, a palm tree, a quiet death in a red closet,
a stack of second hand goods, a taste of grapefruit
with a bitter aftertaste like sorrow.
a rocking horse floating like a phantom,
a silence like handcuffs,
a secret vanishing in me,

not a bit like Jonah

you and i talked of a myriad of things–
disasters, desires, wonder and dread;
leftovers in the microwave,
bookcases, milk you forgot to put back
in the fridge, table lamps, paisley bedspreads,
guns, knives,  and leaky radiators.

we talked of families, poetry,
sex, lying to loved ones, siblings’ shortcomings,
unkempt morning-afters, cellphones
toasted by the sun, kid ballgames,
mountains, rivers, forests, deserts,
oceans, desserts, and dreams.

we talked of love but not of how words can hold it
together for just so long until Gog and Magog
lick up the walls of sanity. we talked of old wounds
and seasons we feared, but never of the
sibilance of sorrow creeping
up behind us,  we talked about talking
until the world ends, but not about how
our world was ending;

nor about the fact that you are almost Winston

when i first came to know you,
i loved you to the exclusion of my own life.
now my own sadness is crowding me out--
i tried to give you all you needed:
a bed of words, the mirror of the moon,
a blanket of clean white clouds--
but you have grown more and more inward
and as i get further away from you
i see us both more clearly.

i thought our two souls would merge
into an immense creation,
not become the divided things they are,
small things
with an immense distance between them

i tried--i tried with all my heart
to give you every gift,
the softness of the spring morning,
the romantic sensitivity of the rose,
the vulnerability
of the apple-blossom so easily bruised,

the steady devotion of the light, and
the short time you didn't know how to use--
you wanted more or you wanted less,
you wanted sooner or you wanted later.
whatever you hoped,
you will not find yourself here
among the perennials in my garden.

the earth has abandoned me.
my life is the bird's flight
which begins and ends in solitary wings--
which begins and ends in
an arc through the air
from the bruised petals of the blossoms
to the bruised fruit of the tree

time erodes everything, they say.
(but our time
has not yet started;
has always existed)

do you believe
in star-crossed lovers?

something
besides
celestial dynamics has
kept us apart–

something
has made my
heart’s disquiet
take its place
in the astrometry of night

where separation is a dark country,
and love is a heliocentric cosmology.

celestial mechanics,
laws of gravitation,

darkness spreading its tiger pelt
streaked with glowing gold,
despair of hope, hope
of despair,
the month of march
crawling at the foot of time
haunted by distance
and dusk…

there is always something.

yet ,
nothing
we could ever do
would be more consequential
than
our first kiss

and the length
of our lives pressed against each other,
our bed adrift on morning’s river

are sea gulls musical? all i know
is that they are pecking at the wind
above your final resting place. You,
who were a lasting brightness,
an irreverent song,
a vision holding fire.

you could hear the luminance
of the dove and deer inside
every person you met and called friend.
your life was the cloud-covered sun
wasting no time on regrets--
when your time came, you faced heaven
without hesitation or shame

beyond the pines, i believe
i hear the sun weeping
in the east. at this hour,
he has already crossed the tides
and is not yet brave enough
to push aside the morning clouds.

only a diffuse and grey light
shines on my pure feelings
and my voice is lost
in the sodden valley below
the moist boards of the balcony.

i wonder how many more seasons
we will have--how much time to get it right,
how many chances to realize
that things are perfect as they are..

i can hear the birds. they have finally
decided that it's safe to herald dawn.
i try to decipher their songs and the rhythm
of the rain on my kitchen skylight
so i can make a poem of it.

when you hesitate, not knowing what to do,
i want to turn myself into a wave
to carry you to whatever shore
you would find most beautiful.
i want to lead you safely across
with my shoes in my hands
like a tiptoeing star
treading lightly through your heart.

think of me as that star, rushing in the wind
passing through the clotted fortress
of your bubbling veins
like a pilgrim's incense
flickering on running water;
a wordless prayer

that can let your tears fall freely,
like rain in a realm once known to me
if you can learn to smile, then
i would have you smile,
but if you prefer tears, then
i will simply love the rain

open this book to any page
and you can see the sun, salty-lipped,
standing with its feet in the watery foam,
stroking the water's skin.
i am waiting for time and tide
but it isn't waiting for me--
i want to taste the sweetness of salt.

turn the page and you will hear
the whispered coolness
through the fragrance of mist
and morning grass.
beyond the boundaries
of these ink-splash hills
there's an unconscious hope
and a tryst with lost love....

our bee-ridden paradise has become
a smug repository of worldly wisdom
and ancient darkness; a candle stranded
on the windowsill taking over
the stack of sunlight rushing through
the day's cracks, amassing transience.

i wish you had stayed.

i would be writing a poem to you now
instead of to the emptiness
strewn by the hours on the sun-bright ground

i have always thought
that the only beauty in life
is to discover irresistible possibility in the impossible.
poised between falling and not falling,
between yes and no,

and i have always thought that the only
sorrow in life is to discover sheer impossibility
among limited possibilities.

so many things left unfinished–
an unkept promise,
some unreadable desires,
and the unacknowledged need
lurking in my heart that beats
irregularly–

yet the sadness in my eyes
signifies that love is
like a dewdrop hidden
in a dry well, refusing to vanish.

perhaps all vows of love
are lies that can’t come true,
only in an involuntary shiver,
as bitter as lemon, is one reminded
of those summer nights when love
was still new…

the sighs of midnight
still murmur in my throat.
everything in its compartment–
the how, the when, even the how-much,
has dissipated slowly, steadily
in the evening breeze after rain.

in the endless cycle,
the flux of life;
these things will forever circle and replace each other :
blue skies and rainy days,
anticipation and regret,
the possible and the impossible,

and that which has never been lacking–
beauty and sorrow