Austin Woerner, Chinese-English Translator

Projects > Ouyang Jianghe > Our Hunger, Our Sleep

Doubled Shadows: Selected Poems of Ouyang Jianghe


Our Hunger, Our Sleep
(from the 2010 issue of Zoland Poetry)

1

The banquet rises in slavering style.
The servants stand in the sky all night,
no steps to let them down.
The flame of a candle feebly aspires.
You are not suited to such heights,
to gaze down at happiness from a higher hunger.
Happiness is a low-blowing morning breeze:
to reach it, you must stoop.

2

Down, down, far below the banquet, shadows
await the coming of the leopard. His hunger
is a condition of the spirit,
voluminous as bloodlines, millennial annals,
but bearing not a single jagged tooth-mark,
free of digestion and excretion,
an expression of reverence for food
and yearning for austerity.

3

The bat's arrival does not require a sky.
Bat tight on bat they spiral forth—
a camouflaged and mongrel flight,
a face transfigured from the rat's,
though the rest of his body bears a similarity
to the birds we see by day.
The bat smears daylight across a negative plate, deepening
our dependence on sleep, our addiction to darkness.

4

We in our sleep have invented birds,
invented song, invented pure
white feathers. But birds
are just the party line on flight:
the bat has no residence in light, his sky
is an underground sky, lower than the visibility
provided by a guttering candle.
Extinguish sight: ash rises in peaceful spirals.

5

Sleep covers sleep as a bat folds back his wings.
While you linger, a thousand miles off
the leopard who was knocking at the door
turns and leaves. His hunger is a prison wall,
and the only door opens onto gunfire.
When morning comes the bat's sky disappears,
leaving the print of insomnia on the earth,
revealing a key glinting in the dark.

6

You hear a knocking in your sleep.
The dead are knocking. What do they want?
A door cannot connect realities.
So you trade footprints with the leopard,
bequeath your glasses to the myopic bat,
and to the dead offer up the currency of sentiment.
You wake to find your chains grown
into your skin like the leopard's lovely stripes.

7

A man stands alone on the face of the earth,
pressed by the multiplied weight of those who lie
in the sky above, reiterated forms like hairs
glinting on the bodies of other animals
as they sleep. A fur blanket slips from space
and covers up your butterfly dreams.
But in this dream, there is no Zhuangzi.
And Confucius might not be what you want to read.

8

All these years you've waited for your banquet in the sky.
Now latecomers mount the antique stairs to find
not a seat remains. You stand all night.
We eat in the plural, but the leopard dines
in the singular. What a lofty affair:
you order your dish in the leopard's abstruse tongue.
O hunger: such a recondite thing, it cannot be felt
unless mixed with a bit of beastliness.

9

Food rises by virtue of its purity. Who knows
how much salt you added to your meal?
This is life's riddle: why we wake thirsty in the night.
You've drunk up the earth's water,
now drink the sky's. A night of rain
needs a throat and a pair of eyes
to hold it, needs a tap screwed tight:
drip, water, drip. Gently irrigate our shame.

10

Water, once collected, will not pour.
The ocean overflows, and yet
our cups and storehouses remain empty.
Look at that ocean—it doesn't give a damn
if the vessels that hold its water are gold
or rot. A horizonless happiness can't contain
your smaller happiness, a tiny daub of black
in a tooth holding back the tiny ache of years.

11

Toothaching leopard: let him go ahead and prey.
Let his vast gut disseminate
like applause. But all this is just
a thing of our minds, this co-opting the rarefied
order of violence to approach the spirit,
as if Hunger were an ancient art, its face
the unchanging face of Time, and Food its mirror.
And we've relied on Age to live until today.

12

The bat's night is the inverted image of day.
After seeing so far in that kind of darkness,
the bat returns to light heart-rent,
eye-lorn. Light, when it shines on a bat,
is blind: it has borrowed the eyes of humanity
to regard itself, vision assuming
its cryptic form. The rat-that-is-bird
wings on, but the bird has lost its sky.

13

When you sit down to dinner, you eat in the sky.
The table rises, as if by an invisible mechanism.
Is our hunger really so high?
When the leopard, like spirit, endures dilution
and gain; when the bat's body on the wall turns white.
Last night's rain was last year's light.
The sun's apotheosis is the glimmer of a candle
illuminating empty bedrooms, empty kitchens.


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