Other Places,
Other Times
Collaborating with Master Zhong
When I was still more a girl than a woman,
my hair hanging in two braids to frame my face,
my mind then still as clear as any unmarked canvas,
I took the materials my parents bought for me
and went to a park beside the winding Liu River
in Guangxi to sketch what I saw.
At this time when any grown man seemed old to me,
an old man who was passing by stopped to watch.
We talked and gradually he began to teach me how
to draw. Bridges. People. Trees reflected in the Liu.
The river's own rapid ever-renewing and flowing waters.
Like the river, time passed.
Youth and age sharing, we began a joint painting.
A raucous hover of crows alighting on an old tree
wreathed in dead vines. Cooking smoke wafting
over a bridge and the rushing water beneath it. The
dimming light of a setting sun about to drop below
the horizon in the west. Cold night approaching.
Once done, we parted. Before that, beside my name,
he added "Old friend Zhong Qixiang." Years later, I
read how "Zhong Qixiang, a Master Chinese painter," had
visited Guangxi. Later still, a grown woman, I read that
he had died. Years and decades have passed since he
last painted. His memory now dimmed but not yet set.
Civic Elegy
You have been away for too long
in the great forever that overtakes us all
remembered most in history and art
but not in the still beating heart.
Iconic still as a huge figure
seated and calmly looking out
past your many small visitors
who gape, and read, and pose.
Some few perhaps try to imagine
what you might have to say about
this divided nation you look out on now,
with hatreds that might seem familiar.
Would you wonder, father Abraham,
whether it might endure much longer?
Seeing Blues
Dressed in short-sleeve blue work shirt and darker blue shorts
a scruffy man who looks like he has probably seen better days
lopes forward, his shanks an awkward inverted v, dragging
what looks like a stripped tree branch that is taller than him.
With a tattered American flag fastened near its top, he keeps
this makeshift pole upright beside him. A breeze bellies the flag's
upper blue ground and its white stars out above his right shoulder,
but in the area below the red and white stripes are merest shreds.
Like the man, the space he walks through looks disordered.
Above, puffy white clouds hang framed with varied shades of blue.
Behind him, on the left, a blue frame house with white eaves
leans left as it sinks slowly down into the Choupique Bayou.
This poem, a concerned witness, wants him to be someplace else soon.
Somewhere life is good, the winds are calm, and hurricanes never come.
Chinese Proverbs Refute Chairman Mao's Droppings (牛粪)
To sleep well again after Khrushchev (secretly) denounced Stalin, and the intellectuals
led an uprising in communist Hungary, he "let a thousand flowers bloom" in order to lure
out the snakes of independent thinking. After, bludgeoned by criticism, more than half a million atone
with manual labor in reeducation camps for thinking freely, their lives forever marked and scarred.
A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood.
Because sparrows eat grain, and for other perceived anti-revolutionary tendencies,
he mobilized the people to defend the nation. Neighborhoods, households and work
units poured outside to shout, beat pans and make a rumpus continuously so that
the bandit sparrows, safe only in the air and in flight, could not find any safe perch,
and, drowning in exhaustion, would repent their crimes and drop from the sky dead.
It's better to be without a book than to believe a book entirely.
To make a "Great Leap Forward" he proclaimed that, to become a great nation
"Everybody make steel." To meet steel quotas, in homes, offices and all work places,
in furnaces large and small, people melted scrap iron and tended fires day and night,
fed with wood from the newly bare mountains. One hundred million peasants stopped
farming for food and were redirected to help the nation achieve this revealed destiny.
Patience is a bitter plant, but its fruit is sweet.
Providence Rhode Island, 1962
The widow had a woodpile beyond the garage in the rear
assembled from nearby buildings demolished for the highway
by loading pieces of wood on a child's rusted red wagon.
She had crossed the churning ocean from her father's farm
as a young woman, trading a dirt-floored home shaded by trees
for a three-story wood tenement beside the railroad tracks.
She worked hard, initially for one dollar a day sorting rags.
She met and married a fellow emigrant. She bore and raised children,
losing only one to the Spanish flu. She helped the newest greeners.
She fed people as she could during the Great Depression years.
One who she had helped had left a mark flagging her place
to the many homeless passing by along the train tracks.
Later, her living children now grown, her husband long dead,
she burned coal and wood in a cast iron kitchen stove
and fed her grandchildren soup, sausage and apple pancakes.
At times at night, she remembered dancing as a girl one Sunday
with her brothers and sisters and neighbors near a full hay wagon
in a cleared field ringed by birches and pines.
Faith
After the second great 20th century war
in a remote corner of Zambia a crone
with a battered hand-crank phonograph
and one scratched and worn record of
Churchill calling for wartime sacrifice
played the record repeatedly in her yard.
She told the growing crowd of listeners that
it was God's voice anointing her his agent
and commanding they obey her completely.
Many believed and built a clay temple to
house her and the rumbling voice of God.
An embarrassed government sent soldiers
to destroy the temple, killing hundreds.
Sakhumi 1967
(Assembled from an account in
Ryszard Kapucscinski's The Shadow
of the Sun)
In the modern city of palm trees and bougainvillea,
close beside the ruins of an ancient Greek colony,
some of it on land and some sunk beneath the sea,
a hungry traveler dines in a restaurant built on rocks
that plunge like divers headlong into the Black Sea
and watches fat and lazy fish navigate underwater streets.
Belief
In 17th century Russia, Old Believers
unmoved in the tumult of doctrinal change,
intransigent in their long-held beliefs,
insisted on pronouncing Alleluia three times, not twice.
And, conversely, crossed themselves with two fingers, not three.
Made their processions round a church clockwise, not counterclockwise.
Accordingly, Czar Peter created an Office of Schism to hunt them down.
Which scattered to Siberian taiga and foreign lands these simple folk desperate to main their essential beliefs.