from from the Passage of Mountain and Sea
by Zhang Er
translated by the author & Susan Schultz


[Readers of TF will already be familiar with the Chinese poet Zhang Er, whose "Verses on Bird", translated by the author and Eleni Sikelianos, appeared in TF's "Bestiary," issue no. 2. This month's Report features her "The Autumn of GuYao", translated by the author and Susan Schultz. The poem is the fourth part of a chapbook forthcoming in the fall from Poetry New York.

Zhang Er, whose previous chapbook was entitled Winter Garden (Goats and Compasses Press), writes in Mandarin and lives in New York. Her poems have recently appeared in English translation in Cross Cultural Poetics and The World. The poet Susan Schultz is the editor of The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama Press) and teaches at The University of Hawaii, where she lives. Her own poems can be found in An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman House) and elsewhere.—L. Schwartz]

The Autumn of GuYao


GuYao Mountain is 200 li farther east. This is where a princess named NuShi died and became the yao grass. Its leaves grow thickly, its flowers are yellow, and the fruits are like those of an herbal medicine. Whoever eats them is seductive. —Legend of the Central Mountains

On the second day the leaves made up their minds to change color. A breaking point, since taking this step means there's no turning back. The sky fills with wing beats as the wind grows colder and the time for hesitation dissolves. The shift from red to yellow to in-between shades demands courage and zealous work: it requires the right temperatures, sunlight, moisture, photosynthesis, elimination of some things and addition of others. The new synthesis requires fresh molecules. An active procedure always. Anxiety that's caused by anticipation of the final stage weaves a wide web, like air trembling between the leaves; it's hard to tell what the beginning is, where the end.

It's not that there is no other choice, as if it were possible not to change color, not to give up hope or happiness, to await winter's onslaught quietly, not to be made desperate, inconsolable by time or memory and then to die with the leaves, the branches, the roots, a bleached barrenness. The question is whether we have existed at all. There are, as well, the self-imposed disasters, the sores and infestations, refusals of treatment that leave behind scars, deaths so brutal they can't be faced.

You can also set up a reading desk, build a wooden house on the slope, mimic the private studies of respected teachers, wise men of the past, plant fragrant thoroughwort beside the house, pomegranates, figs, or let nature choose the fruits and flowers and then listen to the forest, the stones, flowers and grasses, feeling the pulse, the high and low tides of the body's fluids. After abolishing parties and pleasures, fame and status, there will be another place-what is written will stand up in the world dimensional, as you stroll toward the intersection, not giving up but knowing that the circle yields no new design or color. Turn left-no, right!-the surface disturbed as by a stone thrown from nowhere; you need patience and skill to paddle in the current, revising the route as you go, even changing destination-so long as we can not live like poetry's green vine, we must give up grasping till the bitter end. We can't linger, have to move on, must change our colors.

Leaving the house, I walk into your shade, traveling between your upraised arms, though I can't walk in your world no matter how much I invest in it, how crafty I manage to become. For what I gain in walking toward you is also my loss. I can master neither you nor myself in this place. My self is clothed: I put on a business suit, a sweatsuit, a hunting outfit, jeans, even an evening dress that floats to the ground, or a silk embroidered nightgown. Body and soul's cover-up. Dressed fashionably, the self smiles from morning until night, increasingly loved and respected. Yet attention grows geometrically: there is too much to catch! Who can match our skill, our patience, the hundreds of thousands of pages from a single mold? Just look at these trees, the huge and the small ones, bright and dark; their every gesture shifts, alters, adjusts; every leaf different from its fellows. This autumn day, the shade is still thick with them. Under the soil's shadows, roots deep and shallow hidden from view, what stories of ancient origins lie tethered in this shadowed soil?

Even strolling disingenuously on this forest path, you might take a wrong step, cross a forbidden border. "There will be no future if you fail to take the risk." Thus spake the adventure capital investor, infused with our era's truest wisdom. And what shall be our risk, then? Being gunned down or killed in an accident, starving to death, being poor, accomplishing nothing? Death is always the end. "When the head is cut off, only a scar the size of a rice bowl remains." Yet knowing the story's end can't relieve us of our anxieties; we are still agitated, still sense the hurdle that can't be crossed. "The worst offense is having no offspring," says Confucius. This may be the best remedy against our mortal anxiety. "Having offspring" means maintaining our thought lineage; we leap over the barrier between gods and ourselves; either lying in bed or raising one's pen, hurdles are overcome. "Having offspring": doesn't this wisdom lead to overpopulation? Is it not the freedom from having children that perfects our character, fulfilling the five virtues of a Chinese gentleman, that he be genteel, honest, respectful, moderate and forbearing? We endure like that oak on the hill whose yellow leaves are falling, as it negotiates changes of climate, the impoverished soil, the deep water and scorching fire, the planting and the logging. We take it and take it again, swallowing insults until driven beyond our limits. Then we cut the neck that connects mind and body; we strip flesh from soul. Everyone gets what they deserve, after all. Unbalanced, we are given only that one-time connective, that talisman.

A crunch under foot, a squashed acorn, a squirrel with shining fur startling, leaping from branch to branch. At the tree's top, an azure tile, and then the sun. There are so many ways to distract ourselves. We aren't able to find the proper feeling, yet can't bear to watch the TV's poor diet of starving kids in Africa, flies alighting on their lips—but we can cross the street to the Italian restaurant to eat angel hair pasta with red clam sauce. We refuse to turn our heads to see the old man with one leg in his wheelchair by the bridge; the radio plays a Vienna waltz, and tonight I may write a poem for my grandmother who more thoroughly abandoned the light. Only intelligence separates the soul from the flesh, doesn't go to extremes.

For now and out of habit I walk to the right, following the slowly descending path, which passes a quiet marsh filled with purple duckweed and green algae floating there with the scarlet sun burning overhead. The straight route would take me by a garbage can, set up to keep the street clean, its bottles and plastic bags a broken aureole near the skittering of mice and rats. Returning to nature is never easy; we arrive at the opposite to our designs. There is no space in which to think clear thoughts. But I will escape the can, lean against a tree beside the marsh, be one with the dancing flames of the sun on blades of grass, the foliage.

The falling leaves are deaths of design, yet they descend gracefully as if to demonstrate their deliberate certainty, an answer, or to broadcast a truth no one cares to hear. Is this our final yao grass? Whoever eats of it is seductive. Perhaps a willing sacrifice? And for whom? The leaves are red, the trees unbending, the water a calm mirror-like a page.


Zhang Er
Tr. Susan Schultz