Hsia Yü seeks to create in her poetry a verbal equivalent that she describes as “lettristic noise”:The book is a series of 33 poems published in Chinese and English. Printed on transparent leaves, the poems, in black and pink, ink bleed into one another in a staticky mesh

 

Hsia Yü, Pink Noise, self-published, 2007.

In 2007, acclaimed Taiwanese postmodern poet Hsia Yü published a transparent book of bilingual poems generated mostly from weblogs (in English) and from a computer translation program (in Chinese). The book, Pink Noise (now available on Amazon), has ignited enthusiastic responses among Hsia Yü's "lay readers" in Taiwan, but like many other postmodernist works from a postcolonial context, has not yet received much critical attention. The essay begins with the question of locating or localizing Hsia Yü's postmodernism in postcolonial, post-Martial-Law Taiwan, reading the form of layered transparency and the play with (artificial) language and (machinic) translation not as a free play of signifiers or equivalent of concrete or conceptual art but as a realistic representation of digital (uneven) globalization. Reading Hsia Yü's bilingual poems closely through Lacan's theory of alienation and Wittgenstein's ideas on nonsense, the essay shows that the English/Weblish and the Chinese/Translationese can be read as different kinds of language games which are signposts to the questions concerning the status of English as a global language, the loss and love of translation in a postcolonial context, the return from narratology to a musicology of poetry, and the tremendously rich "nonsense" that happens when two heterogeneous and disparagingly hegemonic national languages meet. In conclusion, Pink Noise, unlike modernism with its implicit claim to whiteness, trans-lates negative dialogics into a convivial romance of poetry. - Lili Hsieh

Pink Noise is a must-have one-off, a self-published, literally plastic, literally transparent volume turned out in hot pink and black ink by post-modern semi-expat Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü. Hsia Yü’s deadpan, nimble poetry is increasingly anthologized here in America, and may be consumed in large quantities in Steve Bradbury’s translations, collected under the evocative title Fusion Kitsch and published by Zephyr Press. But if you know anyone on the Taiwanese second-hand book market, beg and cajole that person immediately to find you a copy of Pink Noise. You will want to read this volume in the flesh.To see one’s face liquefied, sliding and slipping off the stiff, slick, polyurethane leaves is to be confronted with such vertiginating quandaries as, how can transparency equal privacy? One thinks of huge flat panes of glass climbing story by story into heat-and-light-capturing pink-washed urban skies. There is text on every level, written backwards in the flux: a billboard here, a news ticker there, in one darkened apartment screensaver kittens go polyhedron, and here you imagine yourself close enough to a neighbor’s bare shoulder to read whatever she’s reading–an instruction manual or a credit-card bill. She’s closer than ever in the mind’s pink eye. But this tide of surfaces may flex again, instantly, and place you in the mise-en-abyme of your own bathroom mirrors, or kneeling before the computer screen reflecting your own wide-parted, penetrable eye.Pink Noise is startling on so many levels, most distinctively in that, lost in its cloudy voxbox, you can’t tell what level you’re on. The book consists of more than sixty poems, “written noise,” printed in Chinese and English, in hot pink and black ink, and on plastic see-through pages so that one poem becomes inscribed on and entangled in the others, a staticky, antic, space-aged polymer palimpsest but without the ordering, temporal implications a palimpsest implies. The bound pages are then tucked inside a stiff transparent sleeve, which is wrapped in a transparent band, each of which is printed with text in Chinese and English in thin, precise white and black ink.The outermost levels of the book provide two contradicting origin myths–do they compete or somehow elaborate each other?  The ceremonial-feeling band enclosing the whole bears the following text:

I’ve always wanted to make a transparent book, and after I had finished composing the 33 poems gathered here, I knew the time had come to make this book of poetry filled with “written noise”… Then I put it in an aquarium and a swimming pool and left it in the rain for days… This is a book that knows no limits and thus knows not to go too far.

The comma and the ellipses are the signature gesture of this annunciatory yet barely legible statement. The first sentence proceeds apace, conventionally encommaed and not ‘noisy’ at all, explaining the book’s provenance in light of the “I”-poet’s supposed intention and design. The first ellipses then begins warp this account. Does it represent a leap in chronology, omitting all the steps between ‘knowing’ a time has come to make a plastic book and the time at which the finished, waterproof book is “put in an aquarium” etc? Or is it merely a pause in the performance of this utterance, does it suggest that the next step after ‘knowing’ is ‘to put it,’ the transparent, perhaps non-existent book, through its various wet trials? The paradoxical final statement has already been enacted by the temporal paradoxes of the previous sentences.That a whole swath of Chinese text is printed on the back (or front, or reverse) side of this band is utterly beside, and thus contingent upon, the point.The band must be slid off to clamber further into this space. The matte plastic sleeve is blank on one side; the other holds the ISBN (that’s 978-957-41-4521-8, if you want to try and find a copy of this dispersed and sold-out book) and barcode, two more visual manifestations of coded identity which only computer and light beam can read. On this level, the Anglophone reader must wade in among the Chinese characters to sift out, in toothpastey, toothpick-thin writing, an English description of the book’s content: “A gathering of words, sheer swarms of them rise out of depths of light–the primal crime scene of a linguistic serial murder…” This swarming, sheerness, and rising-out-of-depths speaks of the murky experience of reading the multilingual and visually accumulative work, while the queer figuration of the serial murder anticipates the fata morgana aspect of the book, in which repetition and reiteration results in now accumulated, now emptied coffers of experience, so that the serial activity must begin again. Oddly it is again the punctuation, the ellipses and the dash, that pegs the English tentatively to the Chinese, inviting us to dream of the equivalencies that might fall in between them.But before we can make our way into the interior, we get one final hefty chunk of prose. This provides yet another version of the book’s inception–a technical account of collecting English “from the Net or from links I found in spam,” and then feeding them multiple times through a software called “Sherlock” to create Chinese and new English texts: “I lineated them both to look like poetry, placing the English and Chinese face-to-face in the semblance of a bilingual volume of translation.”The obvious instability being proposed here among various versions of the text–if selection and translation are at the incipience of this text, then what and where is the ‘original’? Can two separately generated texts have parallel ‘faces,’ and pretend to exhibit a family resemblance?–deranges conventional hierarchies of reading we normally apply to texts. The various accounts of the text’s conception (as recounted on the band) and inception (as recounted on the sleeve) also refuse to be anything but multiple, clinging to us as we wade into the text’s crystalline murkiness. But the canny sleeve anticipates this, imagining a “machine poet”– presumably the Sherlock software?–responsible for the text that follows:

[...]like a lethal lover, it tells you from the start that it is not to be trusted. […] Still, I’ve always felt it understood poetry’s clandestine mission […]I’m anxious to consummate this romance, to bring it to the pink of perfection before these machine poets evolve into an all-too-prosaic fluency.

In the above quotes, all bracketed ellipses are mine. The sleeve (who else is talking? Can a literally marginal fabric ‘speak’?) works from two separate philosophies about poetry, one that it is the combination of symbols from a field of possibilities exterior to human consciousness, the other that it has an interiority, a ‘clandestine mission’, a “pink” inside which is the “pink of perfection” and derives from the insideness of human consciousness.  To “consummate this romance” with the ‘Romantic’ notion of an interiority from which poetry’s “clandestine mission” derives produces the book’s anxiousness, its urgency not directed toward a particular urge. But what act could such a consummation entail?In this erotic-intellectual uncertainty, this pink noise, we reach the end of what the packaging can provide; for more, we must enter the slick space of the book. Inside, the text piles up and confuses; black writing overlays with pink, we move into the black, we move into the pink, it clots and separates, and at intervals only a hand thrust between the pages will make any given text come into focus. Then one’s own hand seems so clear, stuck between plastics as if on a laboratory slide, one’s own hand not figuratively an author but just another specimen in this catalog of what might be specimen language. The overall effect of these poems is that of loneliness, the self being a continually lonely site to which language recurs and occurs. Viz. “17 Will you dare to be bare?“:I slowly opened one eye and then the otherBut that’s a story for another timeDo the words “beach season” fill you with excitement?Or dread at the thought of baring it all?This summerDaily indulgence:Easy treats, delightful ideasDid you bring protection? […]The resolutely transparent yet stiff, hard nature of the pages in Pink Noise evoke screens and hypertext; one may pass through them in all ways except bodily. That dynamic seems replicated in the poems, in which the enjambed lines both follow and detach from each other. One ‘clicks through’ one line to get to the next, with the capital letter at each line’s left margin enacting this separateness. Isolation is the theme of nearly every poem, as well as its currency; it’s there in the line and stanza breaks, there in the ephemerality of the consumerist abstractions, there as the thin layer which is the only effective ‘protection,’ and yet a fraught and flexible one. The radical materials, design, and conception of Pink Noise as an object, then, introduces a new way of reading the textual lyric, as ever-deepening layers and levels more akin to hyperspace than to a dramatic performance of a succession of singular temporal instances. It should be remarked that the only terminal punctuation in this book seems to be the ellipses or the question mark–uncertain, evasive terminals at best. Moreover, the thematic and tonal consistency of Pink Noise. when taken along with the paradoxical uncertainty and multiplicity of the text as a site, revises the lyric itself, stressing not its desire to communicate and be persuasive but its status as an entrant in a capacious, multivocal record of lonelinesses. Just so the poems in this book, clotted and massed together, a global field of inseparable solitudes. - Joyelle McSweeney

 

Hsia Yü 夏宇 (sometimes spelled Xia Yü) is one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in Chinese today. Her newest volume, a bilingual artist's book she designed and self-published in late August 2007 under the title Pink Noise 粉紅色噪音, may be her most innovative work to date. It is—as far as we know—the first transparent book of bilingual poetry and the first creative collaboration between a Chinese poet and a machine translator. Hsia Yü composed the poems in English (and in one case French) by culling words and phrases from the Internet, and then had her machine translator (the Apple Macintosh web and search program called Sherlock) render them into Chinese, which the program dutifully did but not without reinventing the Chinese language as we know it. There is hardly a line in the Chinese version that is not estranged from its source text, so much so that one could argue that half the poetry in Pink Noise lies in the difference between the two versions. In addition to the 33 English poems and machine-generated Chinese "translations," Pink Noise contains an interview of Hsia Yü by A Weng in which the poet discusses the circumstances and rationale behind Pink Noise and the process by which she made the poems. What follows are select excerpts from that interview and a sample English poem and Chinese "translation" from Pink Noise together with an English "back-translation" for the benefit of readers who cannot read Chinese. [Editor's note: A Weng's 阿翁 interview of Hsia Yü originally appeared in Xianzai Shi 現在詩, or Poetry Now 4 (2006). Unless otherwise indicated, Zona Yi-Ping Tsou 鄒怡平 made the translations. vivienjames took the photos of the book, Thierry Cuvillier the photo of Hsia Yü.] excerpts from "POETRY INTERROGATION: THE PRIMAL SCENE OF A LINGUISTIC MURDER": AN INTERVIEW OF HSIA YU BY A WENG   On the origin of Pink Noise and its sources:   I had been listening to all these great noise and low-frequency acoustic art CDs and wondering what would result if that concept were applied to words when I came across this translation program. I dumped a bunch of stuff into the program—Shakespeare, Poe, Pushkin—to translate into Chinese and it set my head whirling: Yes, this is the word noise I've been looking for! Why not do a poetry volume filled with lettristic noise? For a year I played with the translation program as if I were stoned out of my mind and composed the 33 poems [in Pink Noise]. My sources for a lot of the lines in the English-language text were phrases I'd found in the endless chain of blogs and the many websites that popped up when I clicked the hyperlinks in spam. I lineated the texts to look like poetry and ran them through Sherlock and then revised the English and ran it through again, often repeating the process many times depending on the translation's frame of reference . . . On machine translation:   You know what amazes me most about this automatic translation program is its carefree mindlessness, which is utterly unconscious. This is the absolute liberation of language, a liberation theology of language/language's theological liberation. It is a kind of consciousness that, apart from insanity or a powerful drug, can never be achieved. It "translates" word-for-word, closely following the letter of the text, and yet the translated version provides no secure meaning. It makes no commitment; it doesn't flow: words keep coming but it doesn't move forward. Nor does it take you anywhere; it persists in place even as it relentlessly crumbles, sentence by sentence it crumbles, and then suddenly [you find] it has arrived somewhere. . . Don't forget it is a product of translation, with a fairly articulate source text; it is not made out of nothing, like the notion of "creation" we cling to . . .   On "Sherlock":   It does away with all connections; it flickers and scintillates; it breaks out in bouts and every now and then it distorts; it flaunts the boldness and self-confidence of someone who is always in the right, but it doesn't intervene. It races, never stopping to think. It simply reacts, reacts automatically. You can't blame it for a being rough around the edges . . . You know, I've never really cared that much for computers or the Net. No consensual hallucination induced by virtual reality can hold a candle to even the most rickety sentence precariously contrived. But now I feel a new romance coming on with this automated translation software, my machine poet. And what really turns me on is that, like any lethal lover, it announces from the very beginning that it is not to be trusted . . .     On the construction and form of Pink Noise:   I came up with the idea of presenting the poems and translations in a bilingual format. It took me forever to find these particular words and phrases and fit them together until they clicked like a music box. I used a cut-and-paste technique, just as I had in making my third volume, Moca Wuyimingzhuang [摩擦 無以名狀 "Rub Ineffable"], but instead of the scissors and paper and an occasional contribution from the wind, I did everything with the computer. When it was busy processing, I'd watch that [Apple] gear-wheel icon turn like clockwork. How I loved to watch it turn . . .     On the future of machine poetry:   Software is evolving every day and will eventually acquire all the logical faculties and thought patterns of the human mind and become part of our daily reality in all its mediocrity and immaculate continuum. There'll come a day when [machine] translations won't read like translations anymore and will cater to people's expectations. So I'm anxious to consummate this romance before my machine poet evolves into an all-too-prosaic fluency . . .   Hsia Yü on the romance of translation:   The books that illuminated my youth were by and large translations. I've always loved those sentences that are rendered with a clumsy fidelity, those adorably literal versions that are virtually indifferent to Chinese grammar (which reminds me of Nabokov, that extreme literalist), and all those second- and third-hand translations from Russian via English and Japanese and who knows what else . . . This “translator” is so preoccupied with fidelity, so infinitely faithful, that it radically estranges everything. The original and translation are supposed to complement each other and create a shared meaning, yet all those faithful, declarative fragments often take on a different shape when glued together. Note that every sentence in the source texts has a clear structure and is thoroughly translatable, whereas in the adjacent translations, every word and phrase is a linguistic entity, with all the characteristics of language in its totality, each driven to engage in an equivalent exchange and winding up physically united but spiritually apart (or is it spiritually united and physically apart?), cleaving like a shadow yet drifting farther and farther away, estranged beyond recognition but with every detail infinitely magnified . . . Nabokov insisted on literal translation. He thought a translation ought to come across like a translation. The deconstructionists believe the best translations are ones that “alienate rather than naturalize.” But this machine poet's approach is even more radical (albeit completely unconscious): it feels accountable only for providing a word-for-word or phrase-by-phrase equivalence without regard to any underlying ideas or meaning, which is, in itself, already poetry for me . . .

Hsia Yü at Cafe Jamaica, Taipei, August 2007

A SAMPLE POEM FROM PINK NOISE     If not quite a harangue, at least a little discourteous You work all day, and get half-drunk at night A little chaos every now and then seems necessary When it comes to a matter that's close to your heart You're addicted to excitement You'll love these easy recipes And the kids will adore this crafty activity But now it's time to clean everything up Especially if it involves your living space Have you noticed something strange going on? Either way, dance around to some silly music And don't be afraid to mingle in a room full of strangers They came to the meeting unasked, with rumors spreading unchecked The food has not been taken, the love not given, time Torn off unused Living with perfect attention to the present moment Became impossible It's hard to understand how far astray they've gone They'd need to go much further back— To a time before the first word was said CHINESE TRANSLATION BY SHERLOCK     如果不相當熱烈的討論，至少一點無禮貌 您服務整天，和得到一半喝在晚上 一點紛亂常常似乎必要的 當它來到是緊挨您的心臟 您是上癮的對興奮 您將愛這些容易的食譜 並且孩子將崇拜這個詭計多端的活動的事情 但現在是時間清洗一切 特別是如果它介入您的生存空間 讓您被注意事奇怪繼續？ 不管怎樣，舞蹈對一些傻的音樂 並且不要害怕充分混合在屋子陌生人裡 他們來了到會議未被邀請，以傳播未經檢查的謠言 食物未被採取，愛沒被給，時間 被撕毀未使用 居住與對當前片刻的完善的關注 變得不可能 它是困難瞭解多遠迷路他們是 他們會需要是進一步回到— 對時期在第一詞是前述之前 BACK-TRANSLATION BY SHERLOCK     If the not quite warm discussion, at least a spot does not have politeness You will serve all day, with obtains one partly drinks in the evening A spot chaotically frequently as if is essential When it will arrive is tightly suffers your heart You is gets hooked to is excited You to love these easy recipes And the child worships this crafty activity the matter But the present is the time cleans all Especially maybe if it involves your existing space To let you note the matter strange continuation? How no matter, danced to some silly musics And do not have to be afraid the intensive mixing they to come in the room stranger Not to invite to the conference, propagated has not been Adopted without inspection rumor food, likes not giving, the time Is torn has not used The housing with changes Is impossible It is the difficult understanding to the current moment Perfect attention far becomes lost They is they meets needs to be further returns— Is front states to the time in the first word The English poem and Chinese translation originally appeared in Pink Noise 粉紅色噪音 (2007). Many thanks to Hsia Yü for allowing us to reprint them. The back-translation originally appeared in Zoland Poetry 2. Our grateful acknowledgments. - fulltilt.ncu.edu.tw/ I am an expert in nothing [original English poem by Hsia Yü] Yes, please send me a biweekly Newsletter filled with diets Workouts and weight loss Secrets, yes, please send me Special offers, promotions Coupons and free Samples from the sponsors Yes, I’ll answer the questions below To determine my eligibility for this Study, if I’m not searching For myself I’ll answer these questions On behalf of the person For whom I’m searching All information that I enter will remain Private I’ll want to give it time To brew Yes, technology Is a beautiful thing

 I am an expert concerning it’s nothing
[Back translation by Steve Bradbury]

Right, please dispatch my fortnight
Current affairs loaded with food and drink
Forge and deduct heavy
Secrets, right, please dispatch me
Perks, promotions
Coupons moreover free
From sponsors sample
Right, I will reply question as follows
Confirm my usability for this
Research, if I don’t forage
I myself I will reply these questions
Representative staff
I forage
All data I enter will keep back
For a special purpose, I will want to give it moment
Brew
Right, technique
Is a beautiful thing
 

Hsia Yü, Fusion Kitsch (Chinese and English Edition), Trans. by Steve Bradbury, Zephyr Press, 2001.

The title of Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü's first translated poetry collection is quite apt. In fact, what first drew translator Steve Bradbury to her poetry was that it was both "very Chinese and refreshingly cosmopolitan." Hsia Yü, who lives in Paris, apparently doesn't grapple too hard with the problem of cultural identity. She's just as happy among the mysteries of Paris as in the warrens of her native Taipei.

A popular lyricist and author of four books of poetry, Hsia Yü is prolific and hard to pigeonhole. Her avoidance of a lyric or elegiac poetic voice and her refusal to cultivate a signature style make her work unique. But it's her adoption of various "postmodern" techniques,—such as pastiche, montage, and repetition—and her quirky fusion of high philosophy and low culture/kitsch that make her unpredictable. Sometimes she seems to be flying in the face of convention, flaunting her wit and tossing a philosophical wink out to the universe, mocking the seriousness of the enterprise of life. Other times, she's dead serious and probing. It's all material for art. It's all a game, it's all laughable, she seems to say. In "Epithalamion for a Tin of Fish," she takes a traditional marriage poem and serenades sardines in rhyme, perhaps offering a whimsical allegory, perhaps not.

Lying in its bed of tomato sauce (or is it catsup?)
Our fish may not quite relish its position;
But what does the sea know of this, in its deep abyss? Or the shore, for that matter, no less at sea, as they say.
'Tis a tale told in scarlet (or is it cherry red?);
Whatever—a little silly this matchup;
Which is to say it is, in point of fact,
A saucy tale about catsup.

If any influence is evident in her work, it is that of French culture and literature, especially surrealism and impressionism, but to say her influence is global is perhaps more accurate. According to Bradbury, a translator and professor at National Central University in Taiwan, her "Chinese-ness" lies in her preoccupation with the poetic resources of the Chinese language, which she explores with "breathtaking sensuousness."
"Nearly everyone who has written about Hsia Yü's poetry has described her as a feminist poet, a label that has infuriated the author, partly because she chaffs at being reduced to an 'ism' but also because her feminism is problematic at best," Bradbury comments. "She's more concerned with the intersection of flesh/text than with gender or culture." Indeed, Hsia Yü's poems are often deliberately spicy and provocative, like salsa—the title of one of her collections. You can almost taste the vibrancy and piquancy of the language on the page, aided by the subversive freshness of what she chooses as her subjects and concerns. She draws not so much from the basket of traditional cultural motifs (seasons, nature) but from the global hand basket and its universal themes (love, sex, life, death) and how they are captured in language. In Fusion Kitsch, she writes:

When did it all begin
This bucolic and pan-incestuous atmosphere
Was it not always there in the selfsame family album
Lovers fallen to the status of kin
Animals fallen to the condition of lovers
Nor let us forget the repressive inclinations
In the animistic discourse to which
All romances arrive in the end

Hsia Yü's is a vibrant voice from the edge of the new world, where East and West no longer matter as poetic distinctions. - Leza Lowitz

 

Hsia Yü, Four poems

translated by Steve Bradbury

Bringing Her a Basket of Fruit

Today I go to this place and some guy there tells me not to come again/ I tell him I didn’t feel like going in any case/ Maybe others do but that’s another matter/ I go back to the flat I’m renting and steam a fish/ A friend comes over and we eat the fish together/ When we finish the fish he says he hasn’t been feeling too well lately/ Lost his job/ Missed his train to look for another one down south/ Those jobs just eat you alive he says/ You get a mortgage buy a house and a car and get yourself a woman/ You have some kids and if the kids grow up looking too much like you then you feel embarrassed/ And if they don’t grow up looking anything like you then you still feel embarrassed/ We talk awhile about the differences between being a landlord and a tenant/ Then we do it/ He asks how many lovers do you have and am I any different/ What a stupid question I say of course you’re different/ He keeps asking me how he is different/ I say you’re just different and if you really want to know maybe you’re really not so very different/ You can tell that just by looking at me he says/ You’re so weird always waiting for the worst to happen/ But when it does then I can settle down he says/ We look at the little mermaid on the VCR/ When the little mermaid loses her voice he cries/ We keep rewinding to the parts we like/ Steam another fish/ I lay out the Tarot cards to see if he’ll find a job and to see if we have any kind of future together/ You’re not going to find a job I say/ I’m not he says/ No point in even trying/ So what do I do/ There’s nothing you can do but anyhow now you can settle down now that you can expect the worst/ So do the cards say we’ll get married or something he asks/ Doesn’t look that way I say/ The cards aren’t accurate he says how do you know what the cards say is true/ You don’t understand what I’m saying so there’s no way I can make you understand/ So why do you believe in them/ I believe in them I say because the split second before I flip the cards over I know all the cause and effect relations since the universe began secretly work themselves out to like the final permutation/ Enough of this universe shit he says/ If it weren’t for this universe shit we wouldn’t be sitting here reading the cards/ I’m a little fed up here I say I’m thinking of moving/ Well why don’t you ask the cards and see if you’ll find a place/ I turn a card over/ The card says I will/ Well then ask if I can move in with you he says/ The card say no way/ We do it again/ But then I don’t know what to do/ And then I don’t know what to say either/ He leaves/ And I never see him again/ Perhaps there’ll be some other conclusion but I don’t know yet/ And then another friend calls who says I really don’t know if he loves me or not/ He loves you I say/ How do you know she says/ Because he doesn’t love me I say/ She hangs up/ I lay out the cards again/ I know that if I wait a little while she’ll call back to ask do you love him/ And sure enough she calls back/ I say I love him because I want to make her jealous/ I know she’ll call him right away to ask him if she loves you why don’t you love her/ She waits for him to say I love her/ She’s also waiting for the worst/ But later she settles down/ That’s because nobody loves her anyway/ She’s awfully weary of it all/ And so are we/ Later I move/ And I never do bring her a basket of fruit

Driving Down to Lisbon

If certain hotels happen to have these exhibitionists
Because they also have these hyper-reclusive types
Then the illusion generated by the entire hotel façade
Hinges on the intensity of the alcohol or the class
Of drug used and so the ensuing reality
Makes for these feelings of extreme sincerity or
Extreme insincerity or the embarrassment of
Being too familiar with something or not
Familiar enough and when I had finally persuaded her to
Accept the loneliness to accept this thing as something
Even worthy of her love I soon came to realize that
The loneliness she had come to love was mine and not
Her own and she had such a fierce desire
To join it that we drove down to
Lisbon to see a friend we all liked
And he had his loneliness too
But he called it
My mother deer my doe

Salsa

And still I have this secret yearning to be that sand dune
Swept away one evening by a desert storm
Only to return the following morning in another form
And I agree we must take action
And, in action, find our motivation as the many
Compañera who fell in love with Ché Guevara were ever wont to say
I sleep in a T-shirt with his portrait emblazoned on it
And when I think of all those men one can never love again
I long to run my fingers through his hair
Light his cigar
Discover, once and for all, the herbal cure for his asthma
I know a little something of revolution
Knees that have known the long march with the ‘Outlaws of the Marsh’
I know a little something of the Don Quixote that he loved
The Kerouac he packed with him whenever he was on the road
The same things press in upon me
And so I take another form
I am Ché Guevara in the mirror this morning
Slipping my T-shirt halfway off
I find his face covering my own
I peer through an armhole
To take in this rare and precious moment
When, like something out of Borges,
I am him and he is unaware that I am him
Nor is anyone aware
Aye mi Cuba, oh my Latin America, I come to liberate you
And let me say to you, moreover, that of the Spanish I pored over
All those many years ago
The only line I can recall (this too from the book of Borges) is
‘Mi destino es la lengua castellana.’
‘I will go with you to the revolution,
But I would ask for your permission
To desert you should I feel the need arise’
No doubt the shallowness of my verse
Has reduced everyone to jeers
But then (if you have read your Borges)
You should know this poem was always already there
In every revolution
In my every desertion
And as for the part where poetry and revolution jostle up against each other
I’ll put on a salsa or two to help me muddle through

Somehow

She took a fan and painted a bird on one side
And a cage on the other and then she spun
The handle in her hand till we could see the bird
In the cage and then she put the fan away and smiling
Asked us what we thought it was she’d said

I love you we said but that was wrong she said and then
We said I love you not but that was wrong
As well and then she took us home

Roaches flourish in these aging north-facing flats
She enlightened us as to the many places they infest
The belly of the fax machine
The interstices of the TV
The tape well of the answering machine
All those places warmed the year long by electricity
Did we have any conception? No, not really

All that we could think of was how nice it would be
If we too could worm our way into the hi-fi
And make our indolent bed there where the music pours out
On all those mornings which we dub the limitations of the age
When we are bathed in the radiance we say
Let all good things converge
Let our pain be our strength and at any moment let us
Be prepared to show our guests the bruises on our hips
And the scratches on our backs as we recite those
Words from somewhere ‘L’amour n’existe pas,
Mais la preuve d’amour existe’

Every time we went to her flat it had that
Look of having been ransacked by thieves
And indeed a thief did finally pay a call
And the conspiracy they hatched was this
He took only things she did not need so she never knew he took them
More importantly he helped her rummage up the things she’d lost
And so whenever we went to her flat after that
She had that look upon her face of ‘Well, why not?’