Translated from the Chinese by Andrea Lingenfelter, previous recipient of a PEN American Center Translation Fund Grant. The poems are excerpted from The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming, forthcoming from Zephyr Press.

Abandoned House There, the steps are deep purple There the plants are red sunbirds There the stones have grown human faces I often pass by Assuming various anxious postures For I’ve always been feeble at dusk While that abandoned house clamps its eyelids shut I stand there, waiting to see what happens Watching day’s agonized rays slide from its body Mumbling to myself, my heart racing My footsteps circle, a nameless and contagious sorrow Shoots from the rooftop and bores through my mind Like a name too lofty to climb Like a gift savored in solitary splendor or a painting Like a piece of glass that shines with refinement but is just dead weight There, everything is like a rumor And heatstruck lamps proffer their conspiracies There all will be proven: nothing will remain I arrive       I approach       I intrude Cherishing a temper I’ve never revealed Living like an urn filled with ashes Its proud days lie buried in dust, untouched Just like this abandoned house I am myself

Premonition

A woman in a black dress arrives in the dead of night
Her secretive glance leaves me spent
It suddenly occurs to me these seasonal fish are all going to die
And every road is now passing through the traces of birds in flight

A corpse-like chain of mountains is dragged off by the darkness
The heartbeat of nearby thickets is barely audible
Enormous birds peer down at me from the sky
With human eyes
In a kind of savage and secretive air
Winter lets its brutal and masculine consciousness rise and fall

I’ve always felt uncommonly tranquil
Like a blind woman, I see night’s darkness in broad daylight
As candid as an infant, my fingerprints
Have no more grief to offer
Footfalls! The sound is just now growing old
The dream appears distracted, as if something were missing, and with my own eyes
I see the hour that has forgotten to blossom
Bear down on the dusk.

Their mouths filled with moss, the meanings they sought
Fold their knowing smiles back into their breasts
The night seems to shudder, like a cough
Caught in the throat, I’ve already quit this dead end hole.
 

Reprinted with permission of Zephyr Press. All rights reserved.