rejectomorph: (franz_marc_foxes)
[personal profile] rejectomorph
Mom has been quite a handful all evening, keeping me busy. Now that she freely mingles dreams, memories, and reality, it's often difficult to figure out what she's talking about. Throw her tinnitus into the mix and it's even more confusing. Over the last few hours she's thought she's heard the people next door singing, a baby crying, somebody delivering a new mattress, and any number of other events. She's got a pretty busy imaginary life. My busyness occupies a merely real life, which is probably nowhere near as interesting. But then, my chronic shortage of sleep might eventually begin producing hallucinations, which would bring a whole new kind of interesting.


Oh, and unintentionally falling asleep for five hours with a half-written entry on the page? Maybe that's a new kind of interesting as well.




Sunday Monday Verse


Thoughts in Exile


by Su Tung-P'o


I lift my head and watch
The phoenix and the snowy swan
Cross the heavens in their migrations.
Wealth, office, position,
After all these years, mean nothing to me.
The foundered horse no longer
Hopes to travel a thousand miles.
In exile, in autumn,
I grow lazy and indifferent.
In history men have
Always been treated like this.
I am forbidden to visit the Western Lake.
There is no place else I want to go.
The wise man, no matter how he is treated,
Knows that Heaven does nothing without reason.
But nobody can stop me
From writing poems about the
Mountains and rivers of Wu.


–translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Date: 2010-02-22 01:35 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] daisydumont.livejournal.com
beautiful poem. is that translated by kenneth rexroth, by any chance? his two volumes of translations from the chinese are what made me fall in love with chinese poetry.

my grandmother, in her early 90s, began to hallucinate. mom told me she was convinced there was a litter of kittens in the corner of the ceiling, and she was frustrated because she called them but they wouldn't come to her.

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