The Poetry of Tang Xiaodu
唐晓渡
Selections: 1986-2002
Tang Xiaodu is a poetry critic and poet, born in 1954 in
1) The Thirteenth Floor of This Building [本楼第十三层 ]
I. The Warning [诫]
II. A Rose of Death [死亡玫瑰]
III. Frontal Eminence [额角]
IV. Keep Your Composure [不动声色]
2) To a Persian Cat（致一只波斯猫）
3) A Mirror [镜]
4) Untitled [无题]
5) Untitled [无题]
6) An
7) Untitled [无题]
8) Hedge Roses in May [五月的蔷薇]
The Thirteenth Floor of This Building
（本楼第十三层 ）
The Warning[1]（诫）
I move onto the thirteenth floor of this building
Not sure if I should be happy or sad
Of course I’m glad to be above it all
But also wonder if this number
Truly masks some type of ill luck
Somebody warns to install a doubly secure lock
Somebody markets a two-buck cat eye they’ll fit in a trice
Solicitous guests spinning tops
None knowing my castle keep’s a hundred yards high, has walls within walls
Only looking down off the balcony am I really anxious
A white carrier pigeon
Endlessly gliding in the murk beneath my feet
Where does this gentle bird actually come from
I turn to enter the room
But the door
Slams shut before me
A Rose of Death（死亡玫瑰）
A nameless archer lies low in the skin
A painstakingly calculated madness rages like a fire
Red arrows, a cruel swarm of bees
The five fingers quiver, and the rose
Blooms on the flank of the tiger’s mouth[2]
Emerging as an endless stream
Petal masks petal
As footprint pigeonholes footprint
A thorn, a forgotten cry for help
The throbbing gyrations of the borders of leaves
Expose a sweet-smelling secret
The roots of time sink ever deeper, until
They grip tight a piece of flesh rotten as mire. But
Dali’s child is long gone
The ocean in a conch
Has long been unable to tell between the sky and a mottling corpse
The majestic mask of death is smothered in rouge
Rose rose, will your intensely toxic inflammation
Leave me to the ashes
Or the flames?
Frontal Eminence（额角）
#1
Who does it present itself to? This lavish precipice
For who? A large flock of white nest-lorn gulls
Drop and fly up. Who will collect
All the little feathers? Like brushing off
Bread crumbs on the breast of a blazer
Observe the world through the compound eye of a fly
The vertical one is me
The dark side the bright side all a constant temperature
On what do I base conjecture
Whether the contact point is admittance or denial
Finally there’s a clear sky. Finally the two acrylic wings
Are woven into the cotton-padded lining
The tepid cup irons flat a final wrinkle
Splashes out the handy dregs of tea
And my heels are raring to give it a go
#2[3]
Dusk like a net, confinement raises a final ray of watery light
My hand strokes
Startled fish
Down. Up
Reed catkins soundlessly flutter down
But the rushes still wear a seasonal garb
“It’s really beautiful!”
Whose voice shrill and coarse
The flash of a diamond knife. The glass is unblemished
Like before, to be branded with the deepest wound
Do your best to handle a current of icy cold
The sound of oars is remote. Tonight where
Will this little boat moor?
My hand gropes. But
In the air abruptly collides with another
All at sea gripping tightly. And an uncertain loosening
Not a sound is heard when you lose at love
Keep Your Composure[4]（不动声色）
Just this way sit alone by the window and keep your composure
Watch how two fingers of flickering light
Whimsically alter dark clouds
Dark clouds and light heads
Suddenly a wall of the sound of water
Agitated masts in a gale
Craving the caress of a black reef
Blood flows in a downpour. Waves of footsteps fore and aft
Cries for help rise and fall
In whose pupils rose the first sail
And yet another
Cataract eyes medicate the national head wound
And ensure where hands fall illness is excised
I coldly spit out Eliot’s butt
The sound of the tide frostily spews me out
On a bleak seashore
A hermit crab gloomily stands watch
Is it still concerned over
The secret gestation
Of a pearl in the grit
To a Persian Cat[5]（致一只波斯猫）1987
A ray of white light in a midnight portico
As if god pays a late visit
Noiselessly steals in, softer than the velvet of night
Each step bearing a lotus, I smell
The faint scent of orchids floating in the air
Dark blue eyes cut across elegance and poise
The shadowy crossing of a body with no head
Toward a homeland of golden rape
The glimmer of a secretive flame fans out
And a starry sky surges in
Shaking light down on a frost-covered earth
The arrival and return of the same sole
Traces of a rainy season, steady the slush fermenting in the night
North to south an indistinct broom sweeps weakly past
A day at winter’s end in ‘86
I slip into your bright shadow
Like a monarch dethroned in a blink
A Mirror[6]（镜）1988
-- for my child
A mirror hangs on a wall
We are suspended in it
Downy laughter repeatedly brushes by
--- “This is papa”
And the finger of a lily peeks into the bright hollow
The finger of the lily comes out of the bright hollow
--- “This is papa”
A laugh of quicksilver is repeatedly plated in the heart
The mirror slips into the wall
And we fly into space
Untitled（无题）1992
When the sky brightens
Nothing will leave a trace behind
Like a wind
That unwittingly stops in a blizzard
Flowers will strip off gay attire
Leaves curl up again
Once more fish stick close to rocks
And the pillar of quicksilver returns to a previous gradation
Like a self-composed widow
Watching over her remnants of chastity
But you will get up in a panic
Send troops sweeping over the land across a river to besiege a city
Aroused Brutal Rigid
Like Plath’s black leather boot
All along styling yourself a king
Trampling the face in the mirror
Entirely into coal dust
Lastly it’s your own face
You suddenly shout the heart hurts
Swoon Incessantly vomit
And calmly throw yourself to the ground
To become a blank piece of paper
Untitled[7]（无题）1992
Furious willows tear spring up into cotton batting
And roses howl. Ashes spew out new meaning
Of course flames might die in midair
But before they fell to earth
Who said to you, I’m going to leave!
I’m going to leave…..
But where can I go?
To dance on a knife blade
My feet were long ago covered in blood
White blood. Pure white blood
Yogic practice teaches me to leap
But I cannot get up to the sky, or down to earth
This is sin!
The sin of a previous life dug out as a trap
Whoever gives in sinks ever deeper
By reason of blamelessness and exceptional cruelty
Black quartz must crack a smile for the iron hammer
I’ve said, my sin is grave
This is the only reality. All else a lie
But a real lie moves a person more than an iron hammer
See, it births lotuses at every step, swirling so brilliantly
As if dreamily suspended in the air
Stamp feet, sigh, and scratch your head
Like a clown between acts
With the loudly laughing audience
Jeer yourself ---
Yes, this is true sin
An unadmitable sin!
Who can guess the distance from a rose to a knife blade?
Dance in the ashes
I’m going nowhere!
An
-- on the same subject as a poem by Ma Yuguang马宇光
A grieving sky an azure mother
Naked like this we stick to you
Grilled. Burnt. Hovering. Plummeting
A dream made strange by water and fire. An unalterable result
Innumerable faces facing the same face
Each faithfully adhering to a noble reticence higher than light
The river valley of death hides the gunshot of time
Mother, we live like this amid water and fire
Untitled[8]（无题）May 1989
-- on the same subject as a poem by Xue Mingde薛明德
As the price is as high as this
I’m powerless to finally make an appearance
That red, the scorched righteous blood of maiden years
The white is brains that once seethed beneath a rocky formation
The green, you like to call the symbol of life
The blue it’s said expresses the shared illusions of humankind
Now they all helplessly entrust to each other
Solitary perilous planets. Sinking clouds
The burst fishing nets of an ocean of giant stones
All that remains are the multiplying layers of moss on a cross
--- Yes, you once carried it
But at this moment
Who is with it keeping a silent watch
As the price is as high as this
I don’t need to finally make an appearance
Hedge Roses in May（五月的蔷薇）4 May 2002
Of course, this is a secret ---
How can lingering vines
From out of a thorny bush
Catch hold of spring
Yet not know how to open
Just furtively gripping to oneself
The savings of an entire winter
Holding back till blood vessels go blue
The winter jasmine and the cherry blossom
Then peach and apricot
Ardor cut down and compressed again
Eventually has the indifference of a snowflake
Slow. It must be slow!
Restraint eases the burden of restraint
In this world there cannot be an obsolete fragrance
See the tiny fists shaking in the wind
--- My flowering season, a million blooms
A cluster bomb that concurrently ignites in a flash
[1] In the Chinese, an end-rhyme of –ang,–iang, and -uang is used in the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th lines of stanza one, the 2nd and 4th lines of stanza two, and the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 7th lines of stanza three. It also is appears as internal rhyme on six occasions.
[2] The Chinese term for the flesh between the thumb and index finger of the hand.
[3] In the Chinese an end-rhyme of –uang, –ang, and –iang appears in the 1st and 4th lines of stanza 1, the 2nd, 3rd, and 6th lines of stanza 2, the 1st and 3rd lines of stanza 3, and the 1st and 3rd lines of stanza 4.
[4] In the Chinese an end-rhyme of –u appears in the 2nd and 3rd lines of stanza 1, at the end of single line of stanza 2, in the 3rd line of stanza 3, in the 1st, 2nd, and 6th lines of stanza 4, and in the 4th and 7th lines of stanza 5.
[5] In the Chinese an end-rhyme of –uang, -ang, and –iang appears in the 1st , 2nd, and 5th lines of stanza 1, in the 3rd and 6th lines of stanza 2, and the 1st, 2nd, and 6th lines of stanza 3.
[6] In the Chinese an end-rhyme of –ong appears in the 2nd and 5th lines of stanza 1, and the 1st and 5th lines of stanza 2.
[7] In the Chinese, this poem features a complicated end-rhyme scheme and the repetition of the same character, or a homophone, and the end of lines for musical effect.
[8] In the Chinese, an end-rhyme of –ang and –iang appears in the 1st and 2nd lines of stanza 1, in the 2nd, 4th, and 7th lines of stanza 2, in the 4th line of stanza 3, and in the both lines of stanza 4.
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