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| Christina & Peter |
The Season of Falling Leaves
To vie with me in age, you must gather
more chill within your bones first
"old age" is a lump of hard candy
that won’t dissolve
lodged in our throats that grow thinner
by the day
lies are lights of paper, their warmth and screams
pricked through with the slimmest of fingers
The source runs clear; the higher it climbs,
the colder it grows
the source hides itself again in mist
and ice and snow
mountains recede into the distance
like a figure vanishing beneath a hat
One cannot demand every rainfall
bring a harvest
yet a single word can break the same sentence,
over and over
the cyan heels of childhood, the stiff waist
of middle years
the feverish forehead of old age—all are narrow bridges
to cross the river
While the pungent fallen leaves press
shut the sprites’ eyes
let us gaze at the fish in the mountain stream,
then turn back
beneath the colorful drift of leaves, they are sleeping
those leaves will take a long, long time to sink
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| Yongbo Ma |
Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, holds a Ph.D., is a representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and is a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese.
He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986, including 9 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose, including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell, Williams, and Ashbery. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024), comprising 1178 poems, celebrates 40 years of writing poetry.
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