Myth of Arrival

Love gets a bad rap in this life. I feel sorry for it at times, but then I think of all the poems people have written about it and guess it can't be doing too badly for itself … even if it is so amazingly ugly.

Nighttime, more time; let love be a fact
like the sun or math or evolution.
Let it be bow-legged, its hairy swayback
form seen sleeping in the woods and bracken.
We come from the first gods: Earth (Gaea), Love
(Eros), Irony (Hermes). And often
there are jokes and none of us laugh. Above
the jokes there floats, often, a small caption
for the viewing impaired but no one reads
them. No wonder we deny love like we
deny logic and science; we cast it
out to go howling among the milkweeds
and dunes, beating it with sticks. Small, ugly
love, how we all hate you; dolt, fool, halfwit.

What can I say? I dig primates … except poo flinging monkeys. No poo flinging, please.

The murky bottom primates
begin their migration a flock
of white scars breaching
the skin their silent babies all
painted in bright colors and
the blackberry bushes, swampy
ground diving, all that asphalt-
black glass and copper, tongues
of fire, villages and their
tables, darkness and
grass and all the vines
gleaming and blooming
and remaining private.

Ekaterina is an amazing photographer. I hope my poem does her photograph justice.

Do not be a child of Sylvia Plath
with gas and all or denied rank and fame
and locked away from your science and math
because of your biology. Reclaim
that which I wished for you but lost; the same
passion to laugh your mother has. The glow
of your aunt at politics. The nickname
your young sister was given in judo:
“Walking Death.” Live in solitude and play
rough. Go to parties. There will be whispers
when the host finds you under the tables
playing “peek-a-boo” in your hide-away
mask. So what? Be open to visitors,
to the wind, to the presence that trembles.

You would think there were no ancient Chinese women poets of consequence by reading the popular translation in English poetry anthologies I can lay my hands on. I suspect this has to do with the translators more than anything else. For example, out of Innes Herdan’s 300 Tang Poems (Far East Book Company, 2000) two-hundred and ninety nine of the poems are by men. Kenneth Rexroth writes dismissively in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (New Directions, 2003) of the poet Zhao Luanluan (Chao Luan-Luan), a Tang era poet: “Her poems were a common type, a sort of advertising copy …” (233)

However, since there were ancient Chinese women poets of consequence, I spent a little time today browsing the Internet looking for them. Here is a poem by Zhao Luanluan that had also been translated into Japanese. I present both:

Chinese original:

Japanese translation by from the website GoLive 5:

My dear friend Evseyeva Ekaterina sent me a new photo for our joint poetry-photo project. You can check out the larger version on her personal page I set up (see the menu bar to the right) … and as soon as I have a poem worthy of the photo I will add that too!