The Hawk, the Serpent, and the Cloud
In writing, he moved from the word I, the word once a serpent curled between the rocks, to he, the word once a hawk drifting above the reeds, back to we: a nest of serpents.
Of course the hawk attacked the serpents.
She became a cloud, nursed us, mothered us, scrubbed us with rain. I, once a serpent, know the Chinese character for he is a standing figure, the sign for she is a kneeling figure, the word cloud is formed by two horizontal waves above a plain, and that in writing Chinese you must show feeling for different parts of the word. Writing contains painting and painting writing. Each is bird and sky to the other, soil and flower.
April, Beijing
Some of the self-containment of my old face has been sandblasted away. The “yellow wind” is blowing and my mouth and face burn from the Gobi dust that scorches the city after its historic passage over the Great Wall. When I was young, I hosed the Atlantic salt off my body—the salt was young too.
In China, “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” means something more; work, no matter how cruel, is part prophecy. Workers in the fields that were Chinese eight thousand years ago, their plows and terraces a kind of calligraphy, face the living and the dead, whose windy fortress takes on a mortal form: the Great Wall.
Even here the North Wind abducts a beauty.
Never before have I heard ancient laughter. In China, I can taste the dust on my own grave like salt. The winter coal dust shadows every wall and window, darkens the lattice and the rose, offers its gray society to the blue cornflower, the saffron crocus, the red poppy.
The moon
brushed by calligraphy, poetry and clouds, touched, lowered toward mortality—to silk, to science, to paper, requires that the word and painting respond more intimately to each other, when the heart is loneliest and in need of a mother, when the ocean is drifting away, when the mountains seem further off.
The birds sing in the dark before sunrise because sunlight is delayed by dust and the sound of a poet grinding his own ink from stone according to the moon’s teaching.
I am happy to be here, even if I can’t breathe. The emperor of time falls from a tree, the dust rises.
Chinese Prayer
God of Walls and Ditches, every man’s friend, although you may be banqueting in heaven on the peaches of immortality that ripen once every three thousand years, protect a child I love in China and on her visits to the United States, if your powers reach this far, this locality.
You will know her because she is nine years old, already a beauty and an artist. She needs more than the natural protection of a tree on a hot day.
You have so many papers, more than the God of Examinations, more than the God of Salaries, who is not for me, because I am self-employed.
It may help you find her to know her mother was once my bookkeeper, her brother is a God in the family, who at six still does not wipe his bottom.
Protect her from feeling worthless.
She is the most silent of children.
She has given me so many drawings and masks, today I offered her fifty dollars for a painting.
Without a smile she answered, “How much do you get for a metaphor?”
Sir, here is a little something to keep the incense burning, remember her to the Almighty God whose character is Jade.
On Trying to Remember Two Chinese Poems
I’ve forgotten the book, the poet, the beauty of calligraphy, the poems made to be seen and read out loud, two lost songs on hanging scrolls stolen by foreigners . . .
White as frost, a piece of freshly woven silk made a fan, a bright moon.
She, or my lady, kept a fan nearby, its motion a gentle summer breeze . . .
He dreaded the coming of autumn when the north wind breaks the summer heat and the fan is dropped unwanted into a lacquer box, its short term of favor ended.
A catalog of beds: riverbed, flower bed, family bed.
My mother died when I was three, dreadful to be a child in baby clothes.
I climbed into her bed and tried to nurse, clutching her body with all my strength; not knowing she was dead I spoke to her, called to her. I remember thinking, before, when I wept and ached for her, although she was sick she came to me, she whispered and caressed me, then the lamp went out and my mother coughed by the chilly window. . . . A night of restless birds.
Without warning a great forest fire, a devouring flame of wind, rolling mountains of fire with nothing to stop them but the sea. Woman is half the sky.
Letter to an Unknown
Five centimeters, already Chinese, in your mother’s womb, pre-intellectual, about sixty days. Sounds can see you, music can see you. Fu Xu, your father, I introduce you to him, he is a painter already saving for your education, preparing to carry you on his shoulders to museums.
Zhu Ming, your mother, holds you close as it is possible to hold a being close, rare as an Empress, Freudian Chinese therapist, she will teach you the joys and sorrows of writing Chinese. May you spend many happy years washing ink from your hands.
You have made the Great Wall of China bleed.
Who am I? Something like a tree outside your window: after you are born, shade in summer, in winter my branches heavy with snow will almost touch the ground, may shelter deer, bear, and you.
Alexander Fu
Surrounded by a great Chinese wall of love, he is already three weeks old and has a name.
His mother combs his hair with her hand, nurses him.
Soon he will learn the tragic news: the world is not all love.
He has already begun to earn a living, a little of his poopoo was just put in a flower pot.
The least part of him bears the seal of his Manufacturer.
Alexander’s First Battle
Now that you are looking over the edge of the world, who will blame you for refusing to exchange your mother’s warm breast for rubber and warm glass?
Will you ever again be content? There will be laughter and music, the solace of small talk, the solace of art or science, twelve-year-old whiskey.
You will search the earth through hard years to find somewhere in a timeless bed, or Venice, or God forbid in the back seat of a car, the return of such contentment. Alexander, fight the bottle, fight it with all your being.
I will fight at your side.
Alexander Fu, Musing
The truth is I don’t know the days of the week.
I can’t tell time.
I have lived a summer, a fall, a winter, an April, a May, which I say because words are put in my mouth because you-know-who is trying to sell something.
My mother rocks me to sleep, singing a Chinese lullaby about crickets playing.
It’s not easy to know so little, but I wake to wonder, I touch wonder, I play with wonder.
I smile at wonder.
I cry when wonder is taken from me.
Alexander Fu to Stanley
Big fool, my ancestors understood we live in two societies: time and that other society with its classes and orders, which you, Mr. America, like to think you can ascend or descend at will.
Do I, a baby,
have to tell you there are laws that are not legislated, judges neither appointed nor elected?
You are wetting your pants to talk to me.
Did it ever cross your mind I like to be ten months old, going on eleven? You are trying to rob me of my infancy because I have all the time in the world, and you don’t.
On this May evening passing round the world
I probably have more diapers on the shelf than you have years to go. I wish every time I shit you’d have another year. Now that’s an honest wish, better than blowing out candles.
(Secretly you want to learn from me.)
You say I look like a prophet. Did it ever cross your mind I would just like to be a bore like you?
Stop thinking about the Jew, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist thing!
The Long March wasn’t from Kovno to Queens.
In summa: you are old and I am young, that’s the way it should be. I have better things to think about than are dreamt of in your toilet-trained world.
Letter to Alexander Fu, Seven Years Old
A few days after your first birthday, we had lunch on soup I made for grown-ups, your father took you from your mother’s arms, carried you around our house to show you the sights; he passed a painting of barren Sarah offering Hagar to Abraham, old as I am. Then he stopped before a half-naked lady looking in a mirror, her two faces made you laugh.
In the library he showed you a family resting on a hillside while their donkey grazed.
He did not tell you who they were, or that they were on their way to Egypt.
He explained in Chinese and English:
“In this kind of painting, you must show the source of light. The sunlight is behind the olive tree, the donkey and sleeping father are in shade.”
He named the colors, showed you a rainbow over a river.
You clapped hands and danced in his arms, screeched so loud for joy, the dogs barked.
Next he came to an archangel with black wings leading a boy carrying a fish.
He didn’t tell you the boy will take fish gall, put it into his father’s eyes and cure his blindness.
Your father is a Chinese artist with a green card, you are an American citizen in his arms.
Six years have passed. I read this letter to Alexander, asked him what it meant.
He said, “It means Daddy likes me.
He should have explained in English before Chinese.
Abraham lived a hundred years, had a baby and made God laugh.
God tells the heart what to do, the heart tells the brain what to do.
I like that story, I want to take it home.”
To Angelina, Whose Chinese Name Means Happiness
She lies naked, five days old, a chance that history might be kindness and love, a chance the size and strength of her hands—the rarest Chinese-American beauty, certain to break hearts.
May she teach her children Mandarin, Tu Fu and calligraphy, however busy the city.
May she know the joy of singing, may she play a musical instrument, may she find her own way in the wilderness.
Under the seven halts in the sky, may she and her brother who is four having sucked from the breast of one mother, swear on her dark nipple to be true to her nature.
I remember an ancient Chinese poet saw a nine-year-old beauty in a rose garden.
No one near the child would speak except in whispers—such was the power and burden of beauty.
After ten ancient years the poet returned to marry her.
Later, the French and British in Beijing ravished the sacred garden, pillaged the Summer Palace.
It was not enough for the Brits to have roses bloom at Westminster in December . . . Angelina, you are five days old and I have some 28,000 days.
If I were not married, I would wait.
To Alexander Fu on His Beginning and 13th Birthday
Severed from your mother, there was a first heartache, a loneliness before your first peek at the world, your mother’s hand was a comb for your proud hair, fresh from the womb—born at night, you and moonlight tipped the scale a 6lb 8oz miracle, a sky-kicking son born to Chinese obligation but already American.
You were a human flower, a pink carnation.
You were not fed by sunlight and rain.
You sucked the wise milk of Han.
Your first stop, the Riverdale station, a stuffed lion and meditation.
Out of PS 24, you will become a full Alexander moon over the trees before you’re done. It would not please your mother to have a moon god for a son.
She would prefer you had the grace to be mortal, to make the world a better place.
There is a lesson in your grandmother’s face: do not forget the Way of your ancestors. Make a wise wish on your 13th birthday, seize the day from history and geography.
If you lead, you will not lose the Way, in your family’s good company, where wisdom is common as sunfish.
Protected from poisonous snakes by calligraphy: paintings of many as the few, the few as many.
You already dine on a gluten-free dish of some dead old King’s English.
In your heart, keep Fu before Alexander, and do onto others as you would have others do onto you.
To Alexander Who Wanted to Be a Cosmologist
September 27th and 28th, two dark rainy days.
Alex was crying for no reason.
He said, “I thought summer was longer.
It’s cold. It’s already autumn.”
Embraced, no one told him you must learn to love fall, winter, and spring.
I did not say beware of perfect happiness.
A tree without leaves is full of whispering.
Bats are 1/5th of the world’s mammal population. Viruses are polysexual.
Age 10, he wanted to be a cosmologist.
I write this 7 years later.
Alex looks down, fingering his computer.
He composes music, temperate melodies made for all seasons.
I have his discarded fiddle
I will paint blue.
To Alexander Fu on His 18th Birthday
How distant the departure of you, a young boy.
The truth is not just a point of view.
It is a fact, and the truth today is your birthday.
Was Tolstoy a good or bad boy?
He told the truth about war and peace.
I never heard him sing.
Today your birthday is worth a song.
A beautiful song is more beautiful than a birthday cake. For good reasons, your father taught you, in the twilight days of Tang, Buddhist and Daoist literati gave life, constructed a new art form that joined poetry, music, and painting.
Poetry and calligraphy offered visualized thought.
Four tones used when speaking Chinese give the same word different meanings, gave the new works music and rhythm.
Your father smiled although in the past, his laughter had been strangled.
A young man, you’ve just been given a bedroom studio upstairs for your privacy and music.
Your computer music lyrics are mostly monosyllabic.
Computer music does not need a mouth, needs fingering, electricity, or batteries.
I almost forgot your mother played Beethoven,
“Ode to Joy” from his 9th symphony, on my 19th century Steinway piano; she never had a piano lesson. A notorious family thief wanted to be a singer.
Your music travels with the speed of light.
You may call your computer your dragon, your compositions flute-free and gluten-free.
Still your music is Chinese-American with a heart and soul, never Buddha-free.
Under your balcony, I’ve been fiddling with your music, pun-intended. I think there is a chap you prefer to kiss. May all the gods of China bless you on your birthday. I do not wish you many happy returns of the day, because no day ever returns.
I wish you 365 happy days, the impossible. Every place needs another place. Darkness needs a lonely darkness to make light. Verse needs silence and lonliness, to make songs out of dumbfounded darkness, because of the plague, reduced instrumentation.
Beyond desire, there is the mystery of the soul.
Be careful. Look to your right and left when you cross the street.
“Follow your heart!”
— advice given to me 70 years ago by Djuna Barnes wearing a red and black cape, waving her magic wand, a walking stick.
I was off to Spain for a better life and death.
It does not always work, but it embraces the truth: a good companion, in or out of bed, close to hell and on Easy Street.
Thanksgiving 2020
At a distance I write
in my notebook
where Siamese elephants dance
tusk to tusk.
I write a play within a play
a tragic farce,
curtain going up forever.
At the Thanksgiving table naked I sit drinking
and writing what I must,
because I love the Fu family.
Mother and son believe, hold dearly
President Obama was born in Africa,
Americans read fake news
in The New York Times and Washington Post,
climate change caused by us, a hoax.
The facts, a nightmare: Alexander
voted to export Dreamers
he voted to export himself.
He needed to be “spoken to”
as they used to say.
He is an exceptional welcome dreamer
according to his mom
who always speaks to me ex cathedra.
Sitting on a prehistoric rock
I talk and sing
outside the Peking opera house
in Tiananmen square.
I’m not proud I tried to make a rocking chair
out of Stone Age rock.
An invisible menace
methane flares
are scorching birds
in United States landfills.
A while ago, Zhou Enlai was asked do you consider the French Revolution
a success?
He answered “It’s too early to tell.”
I consider all stories love stories.
Was the story I just told true, a success?
Did I reach the end of the story?
It’s too early to tell.
Chinese Eye by Fu Xu, 2018
Year of the Rooster
Good days are eggs, time a mother hen.
This year is the Chinese Year of the Rooster.
Another moon year gone, this rooster brings “Good luck! Honesty! Fidelity!”
He wakes the world from sleep that sees everything with closed eyes, because everything that lives has sweet dreams and nightmares.
There are Xia to Ming,
Spider and Scorpion Tales not for children—except the tale The Happy Spider, who would not eat meaty flies— he lived on grapes and wine, flying rice, got drunk.
The Emperor Rooster, father of good days, chick dynasties, has suffered year after year watching his hens in the yard running around with their heads cut off.
This morning, he simply doesn’t appear, in his yard or timeless hen houses.
News in the marketplace and Tiananmen Square: the Emperor Rooster is in China,
China is celebrating him, the 4,715th year since, cock of the walk, he came into the world.
Year of the Monkey
Goya etched a donkey that sat for a monkey painting his portrait, a donkey aristocrat.
To show you where I’m at when I first saw that on a smartphone, the sunlight outside the Mid-Hudson Credit Bank, hurt my eyes. It was so bright
I saw the donkey painting a monkey.
Hóu, monkey in Chinese, is a sign of the zodiac.
I celebrate the year of the monkey.
We play with them, they play with us.
Mother and child play Mary and Jesus in a zoo. In beginning light monkeys were created before the garden where Adam and Eve mated.
Time passes, some castration, not much circumcision, except in Fuzhou that keeps Jewish tradition.
Every monkey, day, and night is precious,
Goya’s monkey and donkey are capricious.
Goya did not paint himself dead.
He paints himself before he dies. He etched a bad death, a donkey eating a sleeping man, then he died from eating white paint lead.
Art looks for truth, photography lies.
A year is an invention, something human, the year of the monkey is something more human.
Ancestors, sky and earth are sacred.
Buddha deniers practice dirty trade, murder, hatred.
In Zigong, Salt City of China
In Zigong, salt city of China, the spring rain suddenly stopped.
On the first summer day sunlight went deep into the ravines. In the cold climate,
I chose to walk in an unfamiliar garden.
There were peach blossoms to the west and plum blossoms toward the east wall.
Although I walked alone, I said “Beauty, beauty.”
I did not say peach blossoms were not as white as plum blossoms. The peach blossoms fell into a rage, flaming red to the very roots of their hair, their faces redder and redder with accusation.
But I intended no harm, no offense.
There was no reason for anger.
Pity me on my birthday, the first day of summer, when the flowers have their ways completely beyond me.
Moss at the Forbidden City, 1986
LOUSHAN PASS
A hard West Wind,
In the vast frozen air wild geese shriek to the morning moon.
Frozen morning moon.
Horse hoofs shatter the air
And the bugle sobs.
The grim pass is like iron
Yet today we will cross the summit in one step, Cross the summit.
Before us greenblue mountains are like the sea, The dying sun like blood.
Translation by WILLIS BARNSTONE
Murder
written 2020
The great poet murderer Chairman Mao wrote nothing like a revolutionary sonnet in calligraphy. Forever, then, and now even if you can’t read it, his poetry is beautiful After the Long March the great famine came, people ate rats, blood was champagne.
Mao Zedong was milk, the one tit that allowed the infant China to exist.
Mao’s first wife was mentally ill, he said, “I’ll make her a sane, happy communist.”
He sent her to Moscow for ten red, red years, Mao’s favorite color, not the green green that Lorca loved. He let temples stand, but he cut off the heads of Buddhas.
Mao could write a poem beautifully simple, a gift with a Little Red Book to the people, the same day murder a village of do-gooders.
I paint good news on a krater, neither fake:
The word poetry comes from the Greek, to make, the Chinese character is to keep.
A rattlesnake, I want to make and keep.
* * *
I thought of murdering a lady who was destroying my son, the reason
I sent her roses wrapped in poison ivy.
April. T.S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to il miglior fabbro Ezra Pound.
With breeding lilacs in hand
Pound cheered, raved for Mussolini.
He wished all the Jews were given gas in death camps. There were great poet meanies, Neruda was a kind Stalinist, alas.
There was one Jorge Luis Borges, one Paul Celan, one Seamus Heaney.
The ship of life is sinking, poetry is a lifeboat, wintery death murders, poets give us an overcoat.
Roethke was a racist. I don’t see Theodore waltzing at lynchings. (I see anti-Semites galore, from the empire state’s cellar to the top floor.)
Will Burroughs, writer, “gunshot painter,” shot his wife dead, both of them on H and pot.
I believe in the very right and very wrong, not sin. Nothing is worse than murdering, I’ve heard someone murdering a song.
There’s still an electric chair at Sing Sing, I had a distant cousin who sat in it, a poet did not throw the switch.
Anyway, the Lord was mistaken to think “I’ll murder” is the same as doing it.
I’m going uphill, I’ll never reach the summit.
I sew a poem together stitch by stitch.
Camels pass through the eye of a needle, the devil plays hymns on a fiddle.
The days of our years are threescore and ten, rich men get more years than poor men.
* * *
I cannot forget great poet and murderer Mao not soon or after, now, a disguised American I will sip his cup of tea.
I will stir every line with the spoon, “kill.”
Kill. I is a dangerous word. Never forget
Kill. the pronoun we confiscates private property.
Kill. Alone, Mao’s ideas are not private property.
Kill. Dine with two people, three can’t keep a secret.
Kill. One child take care. If you beget
Kill. a girl, should you want to keep her, you have a debt.
Kill. You owe a son to the people’s army.
Kill. A puppy sandwich tastes better than salami.
Kill. Peasants and factory workers know by heart
Kill. Buddhist death is a work of art.
Kill. I still want poetry that “makes it new.”
Kill. Suffering and grief are teachers.
Kill. if life were cinema, life’s one reel
Kill. life is not a double feature.
Kill. Be civil, run away from evil,
Kill. beware of the white peril.
China Poem
In China, the people give importance to what they call “spring couplets,” paper sayings pasted with wheat-flour and water above and down the sides of doorways ancient and just built.
On the entrance to a cave house, I saw, right side, on red paper, in calligraphy:
“Strive to Build Socialist Spiritual Civilization.”
On the left, on pink paper:
“Intellectuals: Cleaning Shithouses for Ten Years in the Cultural Revolution Clears the Head.”
Across the lintel:
“When Spring Comes Back, the Earth is Green.”
The Chinese know they enter and depart through the doors of poetry. I was on my way to the Great Wall that can be seen from outer space.
Wondering, I stopped at a rural place.
Stranger, I was greeted lovingly by an old mother. I was offered tea, welcomed into her one room stone house.
There was a framed photograph of a young man on a table, some books, a red brick stove bed for a family.
I told He Huaren, a dead poet’s wife, “In that room, I saw a great civilization.”
On our way, we passed a cemetery.
Two women and a man kneeled at the grave of a dead ancestor, touched their heads to the ground.
Then, standing up, they burned paper money.
From the distance, I saw fireworks lighting half the sky in the afternoon thirty years ago.