Riding a bus through Yunnan
Chinese dinosaur fields ahead
no surprises today in the villages
dumbstruck by my own foolishness
certain I will do most of it again
tunnels take us through the mountains
I am grown so accustomed
by the familiar I take it all in
the old stories, the old names
and everything rings a bell
it's hardly a prescription, nothing
won't remind me of something else
in Dali the mountains are high
and the Emperor is far away
they sing at the Bad Monkey
where the ancestors promise
their approximate descendants
will know a person, place or thing
a small dog is chained in the corner
when I ask why she says it's because
she doesn't have a quiet heart, she smiles
I'm falling up to the perfect sky
I won't say past attraction, and not
past love, yet the stray dog has a soul.
Love the last stanza in particular
ReplyDeletehere's my Dali poem from the early nineties ---
ReplyDeleteDali
in Yunnan
The son of heaven
lost sight of this lot for a while
under a mist or a mountain,
why wouldn't he? It was in the clouds
or under, somewhere. Patience
put in the centuries and it was found
at the barbarian edge of everything.
Between here and vertigo, lacking
leg room, with the terror bends, horn
of the hunt. Distance is time and how
can we call their kilometres the same as ours?
Blood ankle deep in independence, that's history
for you. Ruins borrowed back as
masonry. Or failing that may stiffen mud
to shelter. Always noon at the town gates
where village idiots collect.
"Change money!" -then there's a queue to fix
the thongs I thought were obsolete.
All orient wares. The mountain pizza
is built of tofu, a monument
to the coca-cola cafe which has moved
but taken the old walls with it
at least in my imagination.
Beautiful, Rob.
ReplyDelete