Someone Who Dies In A Vision
“[A] vision/you said/that is to imitate ghosts in order to live.” Where does real life begin? What is real life? What is home? Exiled Chinese poet, Yang Lian, examines the world of the dead and of the living.
Photo: Thoa Ngo/Unsplash
someone who dies in a vision is like a poet who dies in a poem
summer enters your tower and ascends
you contemplate like a god, rave like a god
obsessively count flocks of swans per millennium amend
the moon that order bleeding from thin dark claws
puts a rat through its paces with ingenuity
you grow weary of it all even for the wise, dying is still death
but writing that twice-lost stony art
reeks of rot as it gnaws your flesh
you leap into the flames again like a work discarded
so we die in you
the only inheritance a marble chair
your seat amid the keening of the blind
one man’s feet trampling innocent grapes
a vision you said that is to imitate ghosts in order to live
to make inquiries like an old beggar
corpsed on the street mourned by the incarnadine teeth of savage cats
but a rose smelted out of a poem, now that shock will always cause wonder
(translated by Brian Holton)