A SATURDAY POEM
“Going Back to China” by Willis Barnstone (From 5 a.m. in Beijing: Poems of China). A perfect companion to today’s suddenly cool weather and the view from my bookshop’s wingback chair, where I watch for people who never come in.
Outside, the full moon is memory light
knifing those of us who look up and remember.
People drive from blue house to blue house,
and I go back out there with them,
out of my own icestorm I’m sick of. Enough.
In a few weeks I”ll return to China,
to Tu Fu wandering from exile to exile,
from childhood with a horse at dawn
to now with a few white hairs on his head,
still alive by scribbling out his poems,
his talking paintings.
I feel peaceful already.
I’ve not tried to conceal the weak eyes
of indecision
and soon will camp out in new drab rooms
in an empire city of red dust and rice,
alleys looming with white shirts and urine,
a shabby mansion jammed with Ming tables
where Wang Shixiang, back from work camps,
brushpens his unique scholarly books.
Already I wander frontiers of sleeping houses
on my one-gear bike; I smell mounds
of cabbage outside dank cement entryways;
am back to a half moon in Beijing,
to odd books with difficult characters
and a man unwillingly older
whom I wear without disdain and lightly.
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