— to l.z.

 

this is your tree, river, lawn,

your big house, your america.

this is your life on another planet,

you slow down the car to lead me through foothills,

like a documentary of private life on the wide screen.

 

reprints by impressionists hang on the living room wall,

your daughter’s toys piled high on the floor,

daytime when your husband goes to manhattan,

and your child to kindergarten, the streets fall silent

except for conversation between vacuum and lawn mower,

on the treadmill, like a toy train

on its oval track you go around and around…

 

here i am surprised by a sense of strangeness,

not that you have already changed your nationality

or become someone’s wife, i am

surprised that your wanderings have so soon come to the end—

the dreamed-of happy land of our youth

already abbreviated into a comfort cage,

and on the thick velvet couch,

once we speak of china, your mouth curls in a smirk.

 

i am saddened that you have missed an epic change in time,

a myth of time upended amid reality;

every one of your years here,

is a day that we have spent back home.

twilight, i return to the hotel in queens,

put my coat on the back of the chair, before my eyes

that wild girl floats by, loving

freedom more than carmen depicted by mérimée, walking

among marchers in a parade, like a goddness painted by delacroix.

 

…memory retains nothing but the kite’s spool,

i know i can no longer take you home,

even blessings seem unnecessary.

no one to entrust a mission, deep in the night

i dream of myself one step over the pacific,

back to fire-bright smoke-thick battlefields,

loading crossbows and shooting down those toxic suns. 

translated from Chinese by Dong Li