Selected Poems
Gu Yan
NAMELESS FLOWERS
Three red petals are floating on piece of greenness
No others can find
That your slender scapes and petals just grow from here
Every petal is far away
Every petal is incomparably sad and colorful
You are blossoming a little
With the collection of bellyful worries in winter nights
The past waiting is perhaps too much and too long
Nobody has ever heard of it, Like a burning fire
You are watching yourself burning slowly
The snow flowers outside of the window is coldly falling
I want to ask you to come in
It is an encountering on a snowing day
What I want is only that your heart can live
In this noisy world
Your sad beauty makes my clothes full of tears
LISTENING ATTENTIVELY IN MUSIC
——TO C
Vivaldi’s music is confiding like rain
From summer to deep autumn,
Meeting again is a sort of predestined relationship
My pose of sitting up all the time excites my blood
O, friend, your steps are like waving bitter fleabane
Among the ululations of horses, singing
Is a kind of spirit
For countless times of shuttling on paper
Your books are laying out like a mountain
I rest my head on them, when silent
I hear the rhythm of their pulses
This moment, you are sitting beside me
Yet I don’t know what to say
The winnowing music is flowing like water
A kind of thought, a kind of harmonious air
In the luxuriantly green forest
Every lamplight is like a dream
While I explain one dream using another
A kind of loneliness because of inward inclination
Is thrilling through toll, which makes the sky go far away
PRIVATE LIBRARY
Over the river, in the clouds
This tranquil dell
The indigo air melts me
The four walls are soundless souls
Zhuang Zhou begins to dance lightly
The autumnal chrysanthemums under the eastern fences
Make me meditate
Hummocks, the bright moon, flowing water and western wind
I am outside of all of them with leisureliness and listening attentively
To your magnetic voice
As minute as the silk rain
I begin to appreciate a kind of mien
The classical charm of affection
Has elegantly chiseled through the world
Over your castle
There are my eyes like corpse candles
And steps like ghosts
The wings of spirit flying up to the sky
A DUSKY LADY SITTING IN A PAINTING
You keep the dainty and missish image of your early years
Yet in the dark nights there are bearing tears
Frozen on white clothes
Doesn’t it mean hopelessness without warmth?
The May rain is drilling through blasts of wind-bells
You are whooping like lightning descending into the
Isolated and rainy night
It is as soul-stirring, sad and pretty as a painting
On the cold and offish days only you yourself are dauting
the wounds in the depth of your heart
I am traversing the street in the buckish singing
Praying for you and laying on colors for your real life
Yet you are still dumpishly sitting in the painting
Like a white flower that will never fade
But blossom with fatal coldness and colors
THE RED ROSE
This bunch of red roses
Is surrounding me with flinging
And strong arms like a mystic flatus
Coiling me toward the corner of fate
Easily and clearly
What a stimulating day it is
Because of your coming
All like exuberate and flickering bells
Sounding as a whole redness denser than blood
On Dec 15 of this year
They are making the vernal fire in my body
Rise again bit by bit
OLD STREET
When in an old street
It is difficult for me to cover up the past desolation
Like a ray of sunshine rowing across memory
I have forgotten many people
Yet still remember earth and flowers
That is the pain like a steel needle jabbing my backbone
I walk through the narrow street
The wings of a butterfly
Have broken the loneliness with dancing
Not only for the sake of seeing the sun
Well, let me stay to take care of the love’s manor
Or feed a poem with thoughts
The whole life of a singer
Is just like the deep river water
Unable to be away from the desolate tower shadow in the street
IN THE VIRGIN FOREST OF HUAFO MOUNTAIN
It is the virgin forest in August that calms us down
Behind the dense old trees
I see a flock of white birds flying
By them, I am standing high above the masses
At my feet, the dust of this world
Is floating like waves and the light and tears in my eyes
I am pondering the past pains
My enduring is a kind of cruelty deeply hidden in myself
In Baiyunwo Temple,I put my palms together
A ray of sunshine descends from the sky
I am folded by the god’s palm
O, god, my pains have existed for a long time
Opening the eyes of the earth, I see
The croton vines like gigantic pythons
The waterfall like awakening pure water
I become beautiful because of pains
THE IMPERIAL PALACE IN TAIBEI
Nobody wears long gowns and mandarin jackets any more
Stepping into the Imperial palace
I am wearing Hangzhou silk
In a summer morning
I see ancestors’ footprints
From Beijing to Taipei
Just going to step on the storied building
I am frightened by the concentrated space of 5000 years
The bronze wares of Shang and Zhou dynasties
Make me stand aside
And hold my breath to stare at the magnificent and
diversified decorations
They are Chinese ancestors dragging long plaits
And our offspring
Which can be testified
I am looking at the historical long corridor
The ancients’ language surging without any sounds
Is rushing up like tides
It is unnecessary for me to say anything
MOMENT
I am standing here with my long hair falling apart
And blending with the setting sun with emptysis
The patient waiting is like death
As well as stone forlorn by the sea
I am dumbfounded and spellbound
A kind of irresistible power
Hat destroyed my usual expressions
All kidnappings happen in a moment
From the distant edge my feeling
Is rowing like a ray of sharp lightning
The whipping of time is colder than metals
I rip myself black and blue
A sentence of advice and a piece of motto
The coconut palm in the wind is proudly and lonely standing
And surviving oblivion
My loneliness is unique
Desolate and cold
I am standing here with my long hair falling apart
The setting sun is like blood flowing away drop by drop
In the air there are balderdashes flying over
Facing the forlorn stone
I painfully feel
That moment eternity
A POEM DEDICATED TO FATHER
1
Father is sitting before the window
His words are becoming less and less
He is thinking of the past
The world has taken too much from him
Living to such an age
He is indifferent to anything
Joy and pain
Let him have enough days and nights to dissipate
2
Father’s head is full of white hair
Like a bleak coastline
How are shadow and force
And old-time crucifixion
Mangling our peace?
Everything has been overcome
The stars over our homestead are big and dense
Life has no blankness
Father goes to sleep sedately
In the prayers from the church
Day after day
He becomes a happy man
Selected Poems by Gu Yan (Hong Kong: Milkyway Publication Co., 2006)
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Novelist, poet, short story writer, and professor of literature, Gu Yan is a contemporary woman writer and a member of Chinese Writers’ Association. She was educated at Hangzhou University. She was also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and University of Hawaii. Her early writing consisted of poetry; her first collection of poems entitled The Flame Statue. Gu Yan appeared as a novelist in the early 1990s. She is the author of many books, including Hangzhou Women, Shanghai in Nights, and 1911. She lives in Lexington, Virginia, U.S. and Hangzhou, China.
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