From the People’s Republic of China: Josh Stenberg offers two poems
untitled
-on When We Two Parted
susana takes
her leave. there is a grim moment
of notice; storage, apartments,
celebratory wines. nothing stops,
nothing knows how, even memorials
stand cringing at their own pretence.
we are people without gravity, cannot
fill occasion with words have no
place to stand in no ceremony
to summon things happen
merely
the contented spend
whorls of surfeited sorrow
on her; the peripatetic pounce on
new plans, ogle itineraries,
bring themselves this once more to
believe in the meaning of
travel of place of shifting
to frantically revisit reacquire exchange
gossip and tidbits of misheard
trivia, the debris of history
of unreal empires in places
undone
the maudlin recount
every parting to themselves
every ungrasping every
fearfulness of finality since the first
tang poet was dispatched to
barbarian posts, they are of
those who miserously exult
whose climaxes are in welters
and washes of sorrow
and for all: it is, it must be
patterned on foibles of
attachments imagined
and built on the assumption
of a present protracted
eternal and lost
but moments
mercifully pass : we are
overgrown
the present
JS
Untitled
-on transportation
of course even just passing
through or on is travel,
and the drift as criminal as the drive;
meanwhile the constant
disjunctions of culture and
nonsense of race and tantalus
of language and faint pines
or palms make remnants
of shadows on plates of
impression; all this is mere
constitution. so ooze or
exude or bind it. live in departing
getting there harbours
piers airports station. the baroque
detritus of mind is always preparing
universal perpetual motion; no one
and nothing stays put. even the lives of
the never-changing are set
against the rolling eye, glimpsed
as we went past, seeming
to move in the abrasive drag the
gasping rush the sick list and tip the engines of
lucre and fear and wonder and
hope. and in attempting
the observation of difference,
risible in our commonality and our commonness,
desire to provoke that
greedy self-mockery which
demands redemptive the
ability to see in our cruelties
and magnanimities always
like a deep flat drone our
sweet and brutal and mutual dumbness.
yes we talk but not with
yes we move but not on
so that every step pas-de-deux
or circling sally seems to occur
at the pole, where all directions
are meaningless, and the primary
concern is where to get warmth.
write me if you discover
where to get warmth.
JS
Author Biography
Josh Stenberg’s fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in Asia Literary Review (HK), Kartika Review (USA), Pograniczcza(Poland), Tissages/Weavings (Canada) and Corrego (Brazil). His translations of Chinese fiction and theatre have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Copper Nickel, Renditions and in two volumes, Madwoman on the Bridge (2008, Black Swan) and Tattoo (2010, MerwinAsia). Born in Canada, he teaches at Nanjing Normal University and conducts research at the Jiangsu Kun Opera Company.
[…] (Canada/China) A text about an ancient kingdom is discovered in the notebooks of a scholar. Bio: http://unshodquills.com/2011/06/01/joshstenberg/ Story: […]