Friday, December 7, 2012

Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44) by Marilyn Chin

The aeroplane is shaped like a bird

Or a giant mechanical penis

My father escorts my mother

From girlhood to unhappiness

?

A dragonfly has iridescent wings

Shorn, it?s a lowly pismire

Plucked of arms and legs

A throbbing red pepperpod

?

Baby, she?s a girl

Pinkly propped as a doll

Baby, she?s a pearl

An ulcer in the oyster of God

?

Cry little baby clam cry

The steam has opened your eyes

Your secret darkly hidden

The razor is sharpening the knife

?

Abandoned taro-leaf boat

Its lonely black sail broken

The corpses are fat and bejeweled

The hull is thoroughly rotten

?

The worm has entered the ear

And out the nose of my father

Cleaned the pelvis of my mother

And ringed around her fingerbone

?

One child beats a bedpan

One beats a fishhook out of wire

One beats his half sister on the head

Oh, teach us to fish and love

?

Don?t say her boudoir is too narrow

She could sleep but in one cold bed

Don?t say you own many horses

We escaped on her skinny mare?s back

?

Man is good said Meng-Tzu

We must cultivate their natures

Man is evil said Hsun-Tzu

There?s a worm in the human heart

?

He gleaned a beaded purse from Hong Kong

He procured an oval fan from Taiwan

She married him for a green card

He abandoned her for a blonde

?

My grandmother is calling her goslings

My mother is summoning her hens

The sun has vanished into the ocean

The moon has drowned in the fen

?

Discs of jade for her eyelids

A lozenge of pearl for her throat

Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils

They will rob her again and again

Source: http://feeds.poetryfoundation.org/~r/PoetryFoundation/PoemOfTheDayText/~3/GXTohzdp0Ns/244500

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