Week 10: SHARE

Song Dynasty

Lost Fan, Hotel California, Fresno, 1923
Larry Levis

In Fresno it is 1923, and your shy father
Has picked up a Chinese fan abandoned
Among the corsages crushed into the dance floor.
On it, a man with scrolls is crossing a rope bridge
Over gradually whitening water.
If you look closely you can see brush strokes intended
To be trout.
You can see the whole scene
Is centuries older
Than the hotel, or Fresno in the hard glare of morning.
And the girl
Who used this fan to cover her mouth
Or breasts under the cool brilliance
Of chandeliers
Is gone on a train sliding along tracks that are
Pitted with rust.
All this is taking her south,
And as your father opens the fan now you can see
The rope bridge tremble and the lines of concentration
Come over the face of this thin scholar
Who makes the same journey alone each year
Into the high passes ...
_____


James Wright
As I Step Over a Puddle At The End Of Winter I Think Of n Ancient Chinese Governor

     And how can I, born in evil days
     And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?

     -- Written A.D. 819


Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.

But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole loneliness
Of the Midwest?Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?


___

Note: You'll see how the two poems are related. I have a hunch that Larry Levis (written in ther 1970s) is honoring (and riffing on) the James Wright poem, from 1960... Read them together and we can discuss...