Twin Rivers Karst Cavern  

--I cannot tell you all my secrets

   My secrets are still growing

(One)

Seawater surges up again

Bringing the entirety of the flood-tide's desire

From tongue-tip to the soul's depths

Creatures have no way to flee

Earth, give refuge to those heroic corpses

Of insects, fishes

Along with pandas and rhinos

700 million years later folks will seek their fossils

To honor them as sacred relics

Forget the agony that I keep reliving

And my joy, as sharp as a clock's second hand

My inner world now joins in secret league with them

Bringing tidings from eons-old beacon fires

I have been living all this time

As if in a wonder tale

(Two)

I have swallowed flames

I have gone through collapse and ruin

Oh gut-wrenching throes, now engulfed in water

That was my limpid, hard-to-fathom blood

In this wound that won't heal

Ground covered with deposits of karst flowers

Patches of calciferous pools, big and small

Are like your terraced fields, under your sun and moon

They too flower and bear fruit

Your body heat is her solar illumination

Your glance, passing through a 700-million-year tunnel

Alights on her body filled with up-welling passion

(Three)

Stone is forgotten

Within stone another kind of stone is growing

Stone in an alternate form abandons stone

Stone...blooms as a crystalline flower of itself

Sometimes stone forgets the outside world

Becomes as airy as fluffed cotton

Passes through unyielding duration

Lapping like ripples of tenderness

Left alone, but not forsaken

My clear voice has yet to ring out through silence

Of 700 million years that scintillate like starry space

In eagerness for your coming, stone hoards words like gold

(Four)

As the curtain falls on prosperity

All the light fixtures grow dim

Dust sifts down over my heart

Booming surf of the past left marks in stone

And flash floods sweeping down ravines

Gave elephants and rhinos no time to flee

Time and again, small-scale collapses occurred in my body

Due to thirst for a bit of warm feeling

I once held a dinosaur's tail in my mouth

Passing years ignored the songs of trees and rain

Spreading across my body

Already an integral part of me

Mountain dwellers walk on my backbone, bearing firewood

Kitchen smoke rises at twilight

Herbal scents join with rosy sunset glow

Bringing solace for my blackness

I am told that a coin has two sides

Why should my obverse

Be anything other than myself?

(Five)

An eagle once tried to fly into my inner mind

The fierceness of its swoop was too much for me

During limited sunlit hours I stored up water

Lush greenery beckoned insects to their journey's end

A waterfall that doesn't rest year-round

Is my roar that utters

Everything I have to confide

My columnar body is dotted with wounds

In which you will discover my pulse

Through them I connect

With your ongoing generations

The eagle flies skyward along a cliff face

Leaving my heart in an impasse, yet able to soar

(Six)

I can read homesickness

In your gestures like blue-patterned porcelain

700 million lonely years, crashes of thunder

All were footprints of your past lifetimes

An egg on a rock face...goes through its fertility cycle

Stones and water

Turned into objects of pilgrimage

Are totems here

(2015.5.5, in flight from Zunyi to Nanjing)

Ancient Tethys Sea

(One)

I drift on the sea, like a log

No, like a stone

Each day your salt permeates my wound

By now I have the toughness of scissors

You corrode my skin, my hair, my comely features

Webbing grows between my toes

Eons later I have turned into a naiad

At the cave mouth where you pass

(Two)

Sunlight pierces my eyes

I have to withdraw to depths of the earth's core

I can hear your echo

More than that, an eon ago, I was on the sea's surface

Dehydrated for want of a drop of water, which you gave me

Letting my shriveled feet breathe again

Thenceforth an accord was reached

Between one stone and another

You hid away in my heart 

I forgot that I would still encounter you

An ancient augury bloomed into crystalline flowers

More diaphanous than cotton bolls of

(Three)

I know you won't turn and leave

I've waited eons for this moment

I strive to keep my waist slender, my legs nicely shaped

I moved toward you at a snail's pace

Bringing all tears, memories, pangs and allurements

I awaited your caresses

Your absorbed gaze that sets one trembling

Afterwards, day by day, year by year

I live within your field of view

And raptly watch you in the stream of years

If only this moment does not slip by

Let it fend off the all-eroding eon to come

(Four)

When stones snuggle up to each other

Or complete a kiss that takes an eon of longing

Dear One, I beg you not to go far

Crossing a hidden river I'll reach that Chasm of the Creation

Then upstream past a waterfall to that Courtyard of Creation

Abloom with wildflowers, to where you gaze afar

I want to stand on your shoulders

Use your language to interpret the ocean

The ocean and the salt therein

Magnesium and moonlight that dapple Twin Rivers

The ocean and the living things therein

As well as myself, glow of sunset in the distance   

(Five)

Make a taxidermist's specimen of me

Lower a boat down from a cliff's edge

My blue hair is a flickering fire

Light, in the abyss, falls as water drops

700 million years ago I grew a tongue

In order to converse with you in this lifetime

But silence is most expressive

In your brilliant rays

(Six)

I can hear my own snores

A boulder lies on the boulders where you've been

Shadows overlapping, like your truths passed down orally

Have trekked...from succulence of thriving years to the present

The present is just a leaf from a tree

Or fireflies over a stretch of hilly ground

I have not dispatched so much as a mouse

To creep nonchalantly past your slumbering self

Nighttime surf as yet unstirring  

Recedes behind a latticed window

Once I saw a banded krait swimming

Past a childhood riverbank. Grass blade accomplices

Transformed a rainbow-hued vow

Into an expedition route

(Seven)

Wandering in the earth's interior

Each crevice was once filled with seawater

Scales and armor plate were cast off layer by layer

You've seen my towering guise, my soaring guise

In order to pursue a bat

I mastered the skill of gulping down darkness

Whereupon, at present

I transform into a transparent fish

The spangles once seen along my dark back

Have turned into transparent vital organs

I stand watching here in silence

Transformed to an ornate underground palace

Transformed to a mirage you see above water

Having no quarrel with the world, I wait for you to pass this way again

 (2015.9.10  Beijing)

Twelve Back-Country Sites [1]

(Preface)

Your Highness, you have kept hidden for 700 million years

I come with reeling footsteps to kneel before you

All the sand deposited in your heart by whirlwinds

Has changed to a crystalline, nacreous substance

Around the rims of pellucid pools

Your Highness, you are broken down into twelve sites

So your leopard spots can be viewed one by one like clouds

At 30 degrees N latitude

I sit straight-backed within your heart

You are earth’s verdant, precious emerald

At this latitude no other can be found

(One)

Take flight, O spark

Head far away, toward where birds go to die

To where naiads flit over an expanse of water

You say, “Dear one, aim your weapon at me…

For I cannot face my heart’s barrenness

Despite the lushness of this forest”

Highness, please stand erect wearing your fur robe

The mouths of many caves have fallen under your sway

From a peak you gaze out over serrated ridge lines—

—your armor, blazing with a star's intensity

(Two)

Listen to songs that come from the woodland

Much better than all those outcries and howls

Angels are comforting every single stone

From Five-Peak Ridge to Nine Gates

Your Highness, a command from you turns away

The passion of floods that know no restraint

When darkness gives way to dazzling blue

Twelve Sites, be still

The King will ascend from his throne

Each winged, crawling, running creature

Will possess its own dewdrop of love

(Three)

Midnight, splitting open

Starlight, splitting open

Forest and stones, splitting open

The heavens, having split open

All will be packed into a crevice of earth

Your Highness, you are a secret weapon

Your pain overwhelms time itself

For 700 million years, you have been plotting

To merge heaven with earth

For 700 years, you have swallowed up

Countless old men who gathered herbs

Now bearing marvelous fruit on mountain trees

Your promise now blossoms in crystalline flowers

That shimmer in the depths of caves

(Four)

Your Highness, this spring, seize the time before snakes revive

Give me an embrace, repair my wrinkles

With your stories excite flowers

To vie in gorgeousness, on sheer cliffs

As they look down and laugh at moss

All of it grows on your skin, Your Highness

I am hidden within it, submerged in your breath

All these back country sites, gathered in one heart

They have become the height I aim for

I won’t let you out of my sight

As a koala naps in a tree

I trade my life’s blood for part of your soul

(Five)

What makes the seeds so important?

In bellies of birds they get through winter, put forth sprouts

Now in full bloom as colors of springtime

Your Highness, never have I yearned to pass through you

As I do now, through your glances and growth rings

To quiescence hidden deep behind your halo

Seeds in an iced-over valley

Sun Mountain, Moon Lake,

They lend me shimmers of sunlit waves

To draw breaths of you

Your Highness, behind what you have achieved

Is 700 million years

Every single night passed in silence

(Six)

Of course, much of the time I am like an angel

In my bosom holding an infant, riding a carriage made for elves

Applying eerie colors to this lovely life

But no, many times I am like a witch

Though fate has smiled on this life, in my depiction

It becomes full of thorns, with pitfalls at every turn

I alternate left and right, superimpose the front and rear

Fearing I may not meet your profundities again

Your Highness, under your lapels I see my codes embroidered

Latitude 30°, I stand at a primitive crossroads

Keeping company with forested landscapes and caves

I worship the dust beneath your feet

(2016.3.11  In flight from Zunyi to Beijing)

[1] The Twelve Back Country Sites is a scenic area containing remarkable geological and natural features, located in Suiyang County, Guizhou Province. The scenic area includes several natural wonders: Twin Rivers Cavern National Geologic Park, Qingxi Gorge and Tong-Oil Creek Subterranean Crevice.

Weight of Sponge

When you embrace the young ideal in your tender breasts

The weight of sponge is just the weight of wings

When loves loathe parting from each other

When the career crown reaches my head

When fruit trees bear fruit after blossom

The weight of sponge is that of flight

When shells are to be ashore

When tides are to rise and ebb

When oriental cherry is to be in full bloom in April

The weight of sponge

Is that of the wedlock locking left hand and the right one

When The New World is to be discovered

When nails are to grow

When Copernicus was to be burned

The weight of sponge

Is one gram of brain

When breasts are to be round and firm

When vultures are to be desolated

When desert and oasis are to coexist

The weight of sponge

Is that of a piece of cloud bearing rain drops

The weight of sponge lies in everyone’s heart

Alike that of blue sky

that of deep sea

that of generous air

as that of blood of a heart

pining for the other

——————

Mei Er, formerly named Gao Shangmei, was born in Jiangsu and now lives in Beijing and London. Chairman of the China “Twelve back” International Poetry Festival, president of Taiwan's "Autumn Water" poetry magazine. She began to publish poems in 1986. She has written poems "The Weight of Sponge", "You and Me", "Behind the Twelve" and so on. Won the "Best Poetry Award for the 4th China Long Poetry Award", the "Top Ten Female Poets in Chinese Poetry Ranking", the "Poetry Creation Award" of the American Academy of Culture and Arts, the 57th China Taiwan Literature and Art Medal, and the 4th Eurasian The Gold Medal of Poetry Creation in the Literary Festival, the Outstanding Poet Award of the First Boao International Poetry Festival, the 2019 Chinese Poetry Spring Festival Gala. The Best Poet Award, the first "Genesis Modern Poetry Award", and was invited to participate in the 30th International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia. Poems have been translated into English, Russian, Japanese, German, Mongolian, Persian, Ukrainian and other languages and published.

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