Can’t Learn from the Lost

Where are the poems of Censor Wang
That chilled the bones in snowy hills?
How did you write without suspense,
Without events, and leave flesh cold?

Was it enough to live near ice,
To build your door to face the Pole?
We’ll never know. They don’t survive,
Your lines that turned a poet cold.

Bu Ru Gui Qu

Better go home.
Some soul has left
Hope in your nest
Of nothing much,

A huge oval
Of fantasies
That now threaten
To roll the egg

Of your own child
Out of the straw
Through empty air.
Best get back there,

Roll out that hope
That’s not yet hatched.
Leave to get food.
Quickly come back.

Monstruo de Naturaleza

One bird sounds like a rusty wheel,
Shrieking every few rotations.

How does anything stand apart?
How does contrast shape resemblance?

To be monstrous is to achieve
Singularity of presence.

Louder, weirder, larger, sharper,
Somehow not like any other,

But never all unlike others.
The monster’s singular presence

Stays singular among a kind.
It is of its kind, there unique

To some absurd degree, to some
Extreme dimension—only that

Makes it monstrous. Draw a picture
Of monsters and feel yourself strive

To render each one uniquely.
A monster’s not monstrous painted

Among nothing but mere monsters
Unless monstrous, somehow, to them,

And then you notice how monsters
Achieve uniqueness resembling

Something that is not of their kind.
A monster’s likenesses are such

That they bridge away from one kind
By means of combined monstrous traits

To resemble some other kind
Or kinds, not less like but more like,

Confusing the categories
For a human observer’s mind,

Rickety tower of names for kinds,
Creator of monstrosities.

That bird sounds like a rusty wheel,
Shrieking every few rotations.

From the Inside—the Outside’s Another Story

You will never be a being
Unaware of living, dying.
A body with your name might be.
Your name without a body might
Continue, but not you as you.
You’re forever the living you,
No mere being aware of you.