ContactDoubled Shadows: Selected Poems of Ouyang Jianghe
Glass Factory
(from the 2010 issue of Zoland Poetry)
1
The thing between seeing and seeing is glass.The separation not seen
between face and face.
But glass, as a thing, is not transparent.
A glass factory is a massive eyeball,
at its center labor, whose darkness is daylight
glinting at the cores of things.
A thing persists in its initial tear.
As a bird in pure light persists in its shadow.
Gathers light into darkness, offers it back.
Where glass is everywhere, glass is not glass
but spirit.
As air seems not to exist, where all is air.
2
The glass factory is not far from the sea.To know water is to know glass.
Cold, solid, fragile: this is the price
at which a thing attains transparence.
Transparence, strange language of seeing waves:
by speaking it I have already left it.
Left behind wineglasses, pictures in frames, the changing-room
[mirror, all these
specific, mass-produced things.But I live in things, enveloped by things, a life brimming with want.
Language is an overflowing, an evaporation.
And finally, transparence.
Language is flying: void to void, lightning to lightning. So much sky
outside the body of a flying bird,
and its shadow: a nick of light on the surface of the sea.
A thing cannot leave a mark on glass unless
it is lighter than shadow, deeper than a cut, sheerer than a blade.
A crack cannot be seen.
3
I come, I see, I speak.Language is clouded with time,
the glimmer sinks with the sediment,
a haze of blindness disperses from the center.
This is the process that occurs within glass.
Flame's heart, flame's breath.
In flame, water experiences a change of perspective.
Two spirits meet, two obliterations become one
eternity.
Water passes through flame and is glass:
a subzero burning, like reason or feeling,
shallow, lucid, rejecting flow.
In fruit, in the depths of the sea, water never flows.
4
So, this is the glass I see—still stone, but never strong again,
still flame, but never hot again,
still water, but never gentle, never flowing.
A wound that does not bleed.
A sound that does not pass through silence.
Glass is the thing between loss and loss,
permitting light
like language and time
at a towering price.
5
In one factory I see three kinds of glass.Material, ornament, symbol.
They tell me glass is the child of muddled stone.
In the void that is stone, death is not ending
but original, mutable fact.
Stone crumbles, glass is born.
This is real.
But there is another reality that lifts me from this height
to another height, where glass is nothing
but water, a fluid made boned and unflowable,
where flame is a bonechilling cold,
where for a thing to be beautiful it must also be fragile.
All lofty things of this earth
and their tears.
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