Maple Intelligence 

Under the starry sky, I read a tree.

Nanshan's purpleblow maple leaves have fallen

onto metal, wood, water, fire, and earth.

In the cold, I listen to a tree.

My nerve endings being restored to life

hearken to autumn’s red blaze.

In the wilderness, I smell a tree.

The sunlight floating over scatters the scents

of nervonic acid, linolenic acid, and flavone.

In a sandstorm, I write a tree.

Soaring samaras return for love,

mesmerized by a poem about a landscape of red felicity.

The Autumn Flood and the Beast

On a day in September

with the unbridled scent of fruit,

the east-facing sunlight bends its waist

and squints its eyes to eavesdrop from

the windowsill on the pink voice in the bedroom.

When autumn’s shrieks spray from the bed

and the floodwaters from the left swell higher and higher,

the beast riding the water

falls into the first, second, and then the third climax.

The deaths of this age are honey-scented.

Soul-Sister

——For Tsvetayeva

I’m so tired but not the least bit sleepy.

I lie on a plank bed; the cold air coming through the crack

in the door sticks out its nails and pokes at my eyelids.

Those skeletons that fill the abyss

are given voice by death and ashes.

A pair of eyes retreats from the lens.  You,

Tsvetayeva, who endured a life among fallen leaves,

looking upward with your high forehead.

You had to retreat to Yelabuga

so far from the Kremlin’s heart, broken off from an era.

I’m in Beijing, breathing grief,

surviving days of rust and blood.

Bullets refuse to let tears fall.

The prison opens its gates

and I rush toward accused brothers, sisters, and love

who are like a giant army

cuffed to noon’s barred windows with gleaming handcuffs.

I’m hungry but I can’t swallow any food.

My stomach howls fiercely,

rebelling against the pain inside.

No one can use metal to lock them up.

Just like you, my faraway Russian sister,

suffering yet noble!  Homeless,

you made a life beyond green mountains, dim light

could overlook your frail body.

Your bright aura, still there.

Tsvetayeva, my soul-sister,

persevering in your suffering, persevering in your nobility. 

Please use a Siberian snowflake

and a term of kinship

to mortgage my previous life.

I want to hold your hand and walk through the empire’s darkness,

to accuse the sky and accuse the dead once more.

I write poems to live for you.

Handover

Late autumn reveals a mouthful of false teeth

like an old man at dusk

fake-sleeping in the mirror.

Secretly, he

hands over a series of mistakes

and regrets to winter.

He takes his unresponsive ears and sensitive nose

and hands them over to medical science.

He takes a heartless era

and hands it over to poetry.

He takes past shadows and tribulations

and hands them over to scars.

He takes his broken life

and hands it over to me.

Memory and the dander of some thoughts

fall down.

The reflections hidden deep in the diamond

are like insects that have run out of time.

Densely packed, death

is a required course.

It comes knocking sooner or later.

In late autumn, the iron-hearted old man

wakes from within the mirror, grasping  

the handle of death.

Whose skin and skull will he harvest?

The Former Song Family Residence in Wenchang*

The 5pm sun begins to retrieve

the gold color that’s been drying in the sun all day.

On a hill encircled by fruit trees

the former residence of the three Song sisters

appears to be an appointment made in meditation

waiting for my arrival.

The soul of the ancient well

rises vertically, following the owner,

having dried up long ago.

In the grinding room, the grindstone and mortar

faintly try to speak to me.

I face them for a long time, but they don’t utter any words

similar to the sisters hanging on the wall.

They died long ago

but their remaining breath

still stirs a storm in my heart.

*The Song Family here refers to Song Qingling (Soong Ching-ling, Madame Sun Yat-sen) and Song Meilin (Soong May-ling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek).

（All poems translated by Jami Proctor Xu）

——————

Xiao Xiao is a Chinese poet and painter.  Her poetry collections include Time Stands on Its Tiptoes; Even More Grief-filled Than Grief; Xiao Xiao's Poems ( a bilingual Chinese-Spanish edition with Spanish translations by Yasef Ananda, published in Cuba, 2018); Elegy for Another World (Romanian translations by Horia Garbea, published in Romania, 2016); The Speed of Grief (Korean translations by Park Jaewoo, published in Korea, 2019); The Seeds of Job's Tears (German translations by  Wolfgang Kubin, forthcoming in Austria, 2021), and others. Her work has also been translated into English, Japanese, French, Vietnamese, Arabic, Bengali, and other languages. Her paintings were part of exhibits such as "Art by Contemporary Chinese Poets," and "Contemporary Chinese Literati Painting and Calligraphy Exhibit." Her long poem, "Elegy for Another World," was named by critics as a representative work of Chinese women poets in the 1990s. Ouyang Yu's English translation of the poem was published in the journal, Long Poem Magazine, in England.

Xiao Xiao is the recipient of numerous awards in China and abroad, including the Wen Yiduo Poetry Prize, 100 Years of Modern Poetry: Special Contribution Award, Poetry Currents Annual Poetry Award, Beijing Literature Poetry Award, 2018 Ten Outstanding Poets Award, and the Tudor Arghezi International Literature Award in Romania. She is the first Chinese recipient of this award, and Romania made her an honorary citizen. In 2020, Xiao Xiao was included in Europe's largest literary dictionary, Dictionary of International Literary Criticism (Kritisches Lexikon für fremdsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur). Her entry was written by Wolfgang Kubin. 

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