Month: January 2015

from Rosemary’s Mother by Jimmy Breslin (from the book The World According to Breslin, edited by Michael J. O’Neill & William Brink)

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The woman I live with, the former Rosemary Dattolico, has a mother who believes that we are not properly using punishment as a deterrent to crime. It is her view that many punishments now on the books are not effective, particularly the firing squad. She opposes the firing squad because it is too quick and doesn’t hurt enough.

“They should try things out,” the mother says. “Say, you take two or three of these savages up to Central Park and put them in the cage with the leopards.”

She suspects everybody and forgives nobody. To her, every chance encounter out in the streets is a chance to be mugged. The other day, shopping in Queens, she saw three teenage boys at a bus stop. She folded her arms and hugged her purse to her midsection. The teenagers stared at her.

“Ma, do you have to do this?” the former Rosemary Dattolico said to her mother. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Ooohh! They could come jumping out like savages,” the mother said.

The former Rosemary Dattolico called to the three boys. “Will one of you young men kindly come over here and steal her purse so she’ll be happy?”

The three teenagers stepped out into the safety of the streets.

“They should be tortured just once, then they’d leave us alone,” the mother said. To her a loose shoelace is a prelude to strangulation.

(from the column in The Daily News, December, 1976)

from Variations on “The Weary Road”: No. 5 by Bao Zhao

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Don’t you see how grass on the riverbank
in winter withers and dies, yet in spring floods the road?
Don’t you see how the sun above the walls
evaporates to nothing at dusk
yet tomorrow at dawn is reborn?
But how can we achieve that?
When dead we’re dead forever, down in Yellow Springs.
Life has lavish bitterness, is stingy with joy,
and only the young are filled with endless zeal.
So let’s just meet whenever we can
and always keep wine money ready by our beds.
Who cares for rank and fame inscribed on bamboo and silk?
Life, death, acclaim, obscurity–leave them to heaven.

translated by Tony Barnstone & Chou Ping

for Chuck who has been pestering me to post something from one of my novels: the beginning of Part II from my novel Harry

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He does not sleep well.  It is a strange bed, different colors on the walls surrounding him, more than the usual amount of whiskey floating through his veins, and fragments of dreams of empty highways, a strong wind blowing, the moon at midday, Hui-I’s face with the faintest trace of a smile lounging on her lips, a song he can’t quite recognize, a dog barking in the distance.

He cannot sleep well under these circumstances and yet he refuses to open his eyes, climb out of bed, put his feet firmly on the carpeted floor, and begin his day.  Instead he keeps the covers pulled tight against his chest, up to his chin, a sigh, perhaps his own, reverberating in the air.

There should have been a different ending to this evening, but somehow it has eluded him.  And now, half awake, his mind a fog he cannot peer through, he does not know what that could have been.  All he knows, in his present state of mind, is that it should have been, could have been different, is not what he half expected when he woke the day before.

And so, he stubbornly hangs onto what little sleep he can squeeze from this night, hoping against what he fears to be no hope left, that it will be different upon waking, different after a good night’s rest, only this has not been a good night and the rest he craves proves elusive.

He does not sleep well this night.

Wine at East Bank by Su Shih

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Wine at East Bank tonight, I sobered up
then started over, getting drunk again.
Got home, a little fuzzy maybe close to three,
and the houseboy was snoring like thunder.
I knocked at my own gate, and nobody answered,
leaned on my cane and listened to the River running.

I hate it! that even this body’s not mine alone. . .
Someday I’ll give it all up.
The night moves, the breeze writes
quiet in the ripples on the water.
A little boat, leaving here and now,
the rest of my life, on the river, on the sea.

translated by J.P. Seaton

when it comes

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violence
when it comes
does not look
to the side
or behind
but straight ahead
to the heart
of the thing
takes that heart
for all
it will ever
be worth
blots it out
moves on
unrepentant
further down
the line

A Sad Tune from the Music Bureau

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I sing a sad song when I want to weep,
gaze far off when I want to go home.
I miss my old place.
Inside me, a dense mesh of grief.
But there’s no one to go back to,
no boat across that river.
The heart is bursting, but my tongue is dead.
My guts are twisting like a wagon wheel.

translated by Tony Barnstone & Chou Ping

On the road to Ch’ang-an by Liu Yung

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On the road to Ch’ang-an my horse goes slowly.
In the tall willows a confusion of cicada cries.
Slanting sun beyond the isles,
and winds of autumn on the plain. Only
where the heavens hang,
the view cut off.

The clouds go back, but
gone, they leave no track.
Where is the past?
Unused to indulgence, a little
wine’s no consolation.
It’s not
as it was
when I was young.

translated by J.P. Seaton