13469760.0022.111Absinthe2377-3456Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan LibraryAnn Arbor, MI13469760.0022.111http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13469760.0022.111Article(poetry)‘Kant, Who Refused to be a Poetry Professor’不愿当诗学教授的康德在哥尼斯堡林荫大道上散步‘Stargazer’望星空的人‘Returning Home’还乡人Weichi ZhouGoodmanEleanor01042017221Pen and Brush2017This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license. Zhou Weichi 周伟驰. Poems from 避雷针让闪电从身上经过. Nanjing: 南京大学出版, 2013. Kant, Who Refused to Be a Poetry Professor, Walks Along a Leafy Boulevard in Königsberg<italic>1.</italic> Poets detour around stone statues, they are melted by light, they eulogize and sing praises. I see only the starlit sky and its darkness. I am not melted by light. I do not eulogize or sing praises. My whole body trembles. <italic>2.</italic> Time promises: leaves will separate from the branches the leaves stay intact, and emit the smell of corpses I break off early summer twigs the rich fragrance of sap rises as though from a girl’s sweat glands. <italic>3.</italic> Seeing me they reset their clocks Seeing them I reset the celestial bodies <italic>4.</italic> The people of Königsberg crouch in doorways watching the old man pass by on the hour the cathedral clock sounds oppressively, just as in the old days finishing The Critique of Pure Reason, and going out for a walk the noontime is silent, just as in the old days the breeze of my passing stirs low-hanging leaves <italic>5.</italic> The lightning rod at the top of the Königsberg Cathedral lets lighting pass through as peaceful as my life <italic>6.</italic> Last night I dreamt the water of the Baltic Sea erected a high staircase made of waves wanting to pluck the autumn moon from the sky <italic>7.</italic> Suddenly I open my eyes and see lines and black shapes not knowing who I am or where three in the morning the a priori me is still sleeping <italic>8.</italic> Turning the lamp on in the room outside the window appears the river, boats, hop flowers, the street. The light goes out the river and boats, hop flowers and street return to the darkness. Only our window remains as before. <italic>9.</italic> On a star-filled night I look up at the dark Milky Way. But each time my eyes meet it I can’t tell if I’m seeing its face or my own. <italic>10.</italic> Inside ethics orbit the planets <italic>11.</italic> Flowers and females stroll inside the floral axis fruit blocks their road back <italic>12.</italic> In the morning on the way to campus I saw a young woman and baby their skin shining with the luster of Chinese silk Returning home at dusk, I saw many age spots smudging the roadside sycamore trees In a candlelit mirror, I saw myself crying a hard, black kernel. <italic>13.</italic> On an icy evening I walked along the black river and saw the enormous naked planets revolving brightly in the firmament: the great beauty inside each of us was at work as though within reach.

1992

 Stargazer But on man’s journey how many chances are there to go stargazing!

–Guo Xiaochuan, Stargazing

In memory of the poet Guo Xiaochuan (1919-1976), on what would have been his 90th birthday.

There have always been stargazers, escaping their own eras. Standing on the surface of the moon and seeing how lovely the earth is, standing on the surface of the galaxy and seeing the insignificance of the solar system, standing on top of the universe and seeing the invisibility of the galaxy. They forget the rocket on their shoulder, holding off shooting for a while, and they forget the bow and arrow in the enemy’s hands, softening for a while, and while they’re lost in thought, everyone everywhere is a brother. They think that their lengthy time is merely a short glimpse of an autumn cicada on a bright morning. And deadly earthquakes, tsunamis, and forest fires are only a swarm of ants encountering raindrops, wind, claws, and enormous leaves swirling down out of the blue. They realize the towns or countries they’d considered the center of the universe are no more than a speck of sand in the Sahara, and their prideful long history is no more than a brief sentence in the sand’s flight record, in which their systems and they themselves don’t even figure as a letter. They think of life as jujube flowers in wind, some falling into palaces, others into toilets, some falling into a language, others falling into a tribe and a religion, believing their gods offer the whole truth, believing that their birdsongs and fragrant flowers are the most beautiful. They think of their hometown neighbors strolling and moved to tears by their own morality, mistaking it for orbiting planets, such perfection! Those nighttime stargazers have always had their secrets. By the Ganges, or the Nile, or in the Central American rainforest, these rare creatures expounded religion, philosophy and astrology. They used wooden poles, carpenter’s squares, ropes and rocks to track the sun, erecting sundials next to palaces. They invented modern astronomy, modern philosophy and the modern odyssey, grinding out the Hubble and Webb telescopes, using mitochondrion-sized eyes to see the expansion of the universe, seeing a chain of math and physics formulas. The more dark matter there is, the more black holes, the more gravitation, the heavier their secrets become. Those stargazers on balconies or in observatories before dawn had to return to the crude earth at daybreak, had to return to intrigues of the market or palace. Between vegetables and human desire they discovered a quantum mechanics more complex than macromechanics, sometimes they couldn’t feel it and sometimes it was overwhelming, but they could never predict it. Always in a muddle, they stumbled into sewers and wells, ridiculed by women. (Though if ruthlessly they decided to work on the side, they could gain admiring fans with their profiteering.) As astronomers, those stargazers bent their childhood necks into old age, yet they still couldn’t say why the universe is thin and flat, and why in the end humans and astronomers appeared. They hemmed and hawed about archaic constellations, myths, monotheism, and polytheism, along with mechanical cosmology and cosmic teleology, and still couldn’t answer the questions their grandsons asked them on their knee. After a universe of mechanics, of physics, and of chemistry, why did a universe of life arise? They’re awkward and embarrassed, and throw the question to the theologians and ontologists, who toss the question to a poet. The poet spreads his angel wings and flies to the moon to look, flies into the galaxy to look, and reports back that he’s very excited, so very excited, the universe is a dream, life is a dream—and everyone everywhere should have sweet dreams, instead of nightmares.

September, 2008, Beijing: the inauguration of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider

 Returning Home A five-hour journey, from damp cool to cruel heat through a glittering rainstorm, the whole time like a kite-line, the asphalt road tugs my hometown back to me: for thirteen years it’s flown far enough. With the long wait this upturned face is vaster than the sky. Yes when I come back alone, like an English word stuck into a Chinese novel I feel the force of the trigger of time and in an instant, it shoots me into time’s ovum, and then with a ding Sharp forceps drop me into a dish of pain. When I come back alone, when like an autumn bee I gather too much hatred and love, and see the luxuriant leaf buds opening by the road, and the pond changing with the traces of traveling clouds, I feel that art has taken life by the hand and taught it to sneer. Light rain, cool wind I sneeze again and again from deep in my lungs, then struggle silently like a clam on the sand. Yes, “heaven is near”: pure, hard as a pebble in a gully how did it hatch this hell of mineral constructions? A school of carp swims toward the fog-enshrouded city, bringing paper money and insomnia, sleepwalking out of heaven. My darling, when I return alone to my source, like a deer raised in a zoo facing a savanna of tigers, like a deaf-mute child facing strange music, thinking only of desire scrabbling along in a new world and you in the world, like a fish on the deck hopelessly mouthing and like an idiot facing a binary equation my mind flashes blank. The long distance bus passes by towns and villages, men with naked torsos work on the road, and I think of how years ago if it hadn’t been for my fated departure, I’d be one of them with sincere guile and bright sweat pondering the grain, spreading gossip third- and fourth-hand experiencing grief, happiness, pleasure, bitterness but rarely seeing the pitch-battle of desire and conscience that leaves part of the heart in ruin. On both sides of the road are Canadian poplars, green rice paddies, and bamboo forests surround the villages and occasionally a cemetery appears, full of vitality, humble, persistent, like the bent women planting rice seedlings in the fields, their savage fertility. Darling, when I arrive alone in my hometown, my shrunken new life is gestated in a peasant woman’s womb once again a combination of an XX and an XY, the gloomy flavor of a ten-thousand-year-old heaven the flavor of grass and alfalfa, using more arms than an octopus to savor heaven, and to become part of it with lightness and dark, with water and dry earth with the wind of God (He makes me float over the abyss like a feather) but today it’s gasoline and rock ‘n’ roll desire that accompany me home. Strange, inappropriate things. I was vomited out by my hometown like an outsider and occasionally memory covers my eyes like cataracts, conjuring an apparition of beautiful scenery, while the long distance bus seems to head toward a fairyland. But I know, darling, when I return alone to my hometown I’ll still be like the tangent of two circles, intersecting both, then fleeing for alien places.

1995