by Changming Yuan
South Vancouver
Each evening you step out of your rented
Home, and begin walking backwards around
The block on Cornish street, supposedly
As an exercise for your back; in so doing
You sometimes recall Du Dongpo, and how
He would oppose the trend, ignoring it
By resorting to brush painting, calligraphy
Besides writing poetry at an outpost on Lingnan
When he was exiled by the imperial court
(Or the other way around), inventing ways
To cook pork, joking about a Buddhist Master’s
Donkey face as long as the sidewalk behind you
Other times you look up into the deep blue
What you are withdrawing from is a close-up
A panorama of your future as the past while
You constantly have to turn back, just to avoid
Posing a hazard to other normal pedestrians
That is the Room
That is exactly the room where your wife moves
Beyond her bee-like moment for the first time
Wechatting at Huawei in thickening spring warmth
After dawn falls from heaven
After the wondering if never again heaven
Can send out the warmth, the little streamlet
Of the warmth, can attract your wife to the warmth
Beyond her bee-like moment wechatting at Huawei
Yaleugooli
While nobody has ever been to heaven (or hell)
I can readily go to Yaleugooli, my inner dwelling
More charming than Maui and Palawan combined
With a beach more sensational than El Nido or
Lopes Mendes; in particular, a cave more majestic
Than Sơn Đoòng, where I cannot only get myself
Totally lost in seeing countless wonders of nature
But also take a respite as long as I like; an other
Eden where I can enjoy being one and the same with
Hyperion (from North California?) as my soulmate
Or live an immortal life like the Metasequoia King
Near my native village in central China, if ever I
I so choose when I feel disturbed by earthly winds
Or suffer from insomnia in the heart of winter night
Yes, I am already living in Yaleugook, a true paradise
While they could only wish to enter heaven after they die
Aubade: My Home is a Hotel
You might have stayed up
All night, clicking at every link
To your daydream, searching
For a soulmate in the cyberspace
You might have enjoyed an early dose
Of original sin between sleep and wake
Before packing up all your seasonal greetings
With your luggage to catch the first plane
Or sitting up in meditation
With every sensory cell
Widely open to receive
Blue dews from nirvana
But you did not. Rather, you have just
Had another long fit of insomnia and
Now in this antlike moment, you are
Imagining a lucky morning glow
That is darting along the horizon
A Rented Room is No Home
Everyone has an innerself that actually needs
No housing, be it a well-located apartment
Or a luxurious mansion, for which you have
To toil and moil to pay off the mortgage
And constantly to paint, to furnish, or to
Renovate it as you would do for your outerself
But it does require you to design and construct
A dwelling somewhere or anywhere, on a treetop
Beside a streamlet, under a boulder, or beyond
The horizon, where you can ease your entire inner
Being into anything or nothing, where you can
Uplift your own spirit and your farthest relative
As if in a sociological quantum entanglement
Breaking Out
During the yard time 3 days ago
My other being finally managed to flee
From the prison heavily guarded
With the high walls of my yellowish
Skin and electrical wires
Made of my id nerve endings
However, once free wandering
In the endless desert nearby, I
Felt like a gold fish jumping out of
The glass water jug: shall I return
To my cell and continue my chained life
Or die a free death in the wild open?
Prison House
for now, they have all stopped
pretending to be more than chimpanzees
struggling ferociously for power, sex, fame or money
lying seemingly still on each padded shelf
under the roof of hardened darkness
is a bleeding devil
tightly enclosed within a decent
human shape, as if in a vast morgue
high above them is squatting a bloated serpent
with a body of billion eyes all viciously open
to watch for so many tiny dragons
chasing and collecting the deformed soul
trying desperately to escape
form every fleshy casket
Weekend Walk
On a sunny Saturday afternoon
I would lead my inner selfhood
Out of my small rented room
To the Fraser River Valley Park
To let it play with other dogs
Running and jumping wildly
Catching the ball each time I threw
Into the air, the tree shade, the ditch
The bank, the water, and sometimes
The ridge, where it sometimes stopped and stood
Looking beyond the horizon, as if to join the wild
Becoming one and the same with the little could
Drifting freely around, under the western sky
Mindsetting
Powerful are spoken words; much more so are those working silently in the mind.
Every word is a particle for the prison house
Of the mother tongue, from which the mind
Can never escape
Even for a single moment of yard time
The only window is barred with the net
Of imagination, from which a loose thought
May fly out into the gloam
From time to time
Prison Camp
no, there is no
barbed wire; no
neither stockade
nor watch tower
which are both
unnecessary: this
is a real jungle
on an unmapped
island, where
every untrodden
trail of escape
leads to death only
quick and direct
but if you toil
hard enough
(with your pen
or bare hands)
you might perhaps
survive or succeed
Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan and hosts Happy Yangsheng in Vancouver; credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poems Online, and 1,429 others across 42 countries.