Quiet night think, p.1
Quiet Night Think, page 1
Quiet Night Think
Poems & Essays
Gillian Sze
Contents
Also by Gillian Sze
Poetry
Picture Books
Dedication
Instructions
Quiet Night Think
Fauna
Prayer
Ten Transitions
Welcoming Spring
Audacity
Tomorrow’s Spring Equinox
Ontario Sleet
Visiting Burrard Inlet
Out and About
Thoughts on Reading Poems
First Day of Autumn
Squamish, B.C.
Snow Festival
To Draw Water
Seize
Multiverse
Yard Work
Nursery
Perennials
Current
Wasaga
Babble
Sitting Inside the Moon
Queen Mary Road
Kindling
Archaeology
Capricorn Onwards
The Hesitant Gaze
Above, the Geese
On Process
All I have to Say
Inauguration
That World Inverted
Fricatives (A Visit)
Endnotes
Notes & Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Also by Gillian Sze
Poetry
Fish Bones
The Anatomy of Clay
Peeling Rambutan
Redrafting Winter
Panicle
Picture Books
The Night Is Deep and Wide
My Love for You Is Always
You Are My Favorite Color
Dedication
This book is for my family,
especially my mother and father—
I sing for you.
Instructions
When I say yellow,
fold yourself.
Lose count of geese.
Measure seeds
by placing them between your lips
and humming.
A walnut lets out an opera.
Observe the cypress in full sunlight.
Do so again in old age.
If it grows bright,
pay homage.
If it grows dark,
bargain at will.
The fern is another word
for memory.
Watch the clouds
as they knit their way
across the night.
What I want to tell you
is imperative—
that we are flawed
and exalted,
that there are those
who still look to the raven for rain.
When the wind
pines through your window,
let it.
The wind misses you.
It misses
everything
about
you.
Quiet Night Think
There is a famous poem, written by Li Bai in the eighth century, which has long been taught to schoolchildren in China. It goes as follows:
床前明月光,
疑是地上霜。
举头望明月,
低头思故乡。
Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,
I think that it is frost upon the ground.
I raise my head and look at the bright moon,
I lower my head and think of home.
Written in the form of a quatrain, each line five characters long, the poem conveys the speaker’s yearning for home while gazing at the moon..”1 All this is done in twenty characters. There have been innumerable translations of this poem and this particular version manages to succeed in thirty-five words. Chinese poetry tends to be economical and pithy. To translate from a language that typically removes articles and pronouns is no simple task. Consider, for instance, the title of the poem, 靜夜思 [ Jìng Yè S ī], which means literally “Quiet Night Think.” Some translators supply “Thinking on a Quiet Night,” others “Quiet Night Thoughts,” or even a singular “A Quiet Night Thought.” Some have taken more liberal and creative routes, and so the poem is variously entitled: “Contemplating Moonlight,” “Brooding in the Still Night,” or “Lamentations in the Tranquility of Night.” Evidently, the Chinese title bears no mention of moonlight or lamentation. Most Chinese people simply understand “Quiet Night Think” as “nostalgia.” Anyone who has been nostalgic would agree that nostalgia is often a product of night, silence, thought, and yes, probably moonlight.
When I first learned this poem, I was six. I attended Saturday Chinese school in Winnipeg and had to have the poem memorized for a recitation competition the following week. While it was easy enough to remember (only twenty characters long and following a catchy AABA rhyme scheme) I wanted, more than anything, to know what it was about. I could recite the poem perfectly in Mandarin—both tonally and rhythmically, incorporating even that unwritten pause that separates the first two syllables from the latter three in each line—but I could see that in English, my stronger language, something was missing. After converting each monosyllabic Chinese character into an English counterpart, I still could not make out the sense. The lines became:
bed front bright moon light
suspect is ground on frost
raise head look bright moon
low head think hometown.
My mother, who sat with me at the dining room table, struggled to translate. She would repeat a word from the poem, as if murmuring it again and again in Chinese could somehow locate it in English. Then she would pause and hold her breath as if she was nearing it, but all that came out was air. A frustrated burst of breath.
Only now do I see that what I was asking my mother to do was not translate the text, word for word, but to translate poetry, which is a different thing entirely. William Carlos Williams defines a poem as “a thing made up of . . . words and the spaces between them.”2 What I was demanding of my mother was to translate that space, to string together for me the twenty blocks into poetry. Between her scant English and my dogged determination to pry meaning out of her, we found ourselves caught in the middle of words and languages. Our stuttering search for precision led only to the disappointment that I couldn’t feel the same sway from the poem as she did.
What is this space that poetry offers? Creative space. Emotional space. Reflective space. A space for possibilities. The poem, for a long time, remained a rigid slab of words with no room to make the leap. I wanted space, but I didn’t know then that to gain it, you have to lose something. Loss, as my mother already knew, is what provides the space from which meaning can emerge.
* * *
What takes place between the third and fourth line, between lifting one’s head to the moon and then bowing? A lot. Li Bai knows how that space is filled. While revered as one of the best Tang Dynasty poets, Li Bai is a bit of a mystery with uncertain origins (some say he is from the Sichuan province, some say he may have been Turkic). Many transliterations of his name exist so he is also Li Po, Li Pai, or Li T’ai-po. Ezra Pound, in Cathay, even refers to the Chinese poet as Rihaku, the Japanese rendering of his name.
Li Bai had opportunities, presumably, for nostalgia. A Confucian scholar, a Daoist hermit, a soldier, and a drunk, Li Bai led a life of movement. He searched for patrons and listeners. Eventually recognized for his poetic genius, he was appointed by the emperor and brought to the capital of Chang’an, but was later expelled (he was drunk once again in court but this time got in trouble for it). His wandering continued until he died.
Of course, I only learned this later when I was older and came across a book of Chinese verse and was reminded of the poem. At the time, when I was sitting at the dining room table with my mother, I didn’t know anything about what it meant to look up on a quiet night when the moonlight hit the floor in front of my bed. In five words (bed front bright moon light), Li Bai tells us exactly where the moon is, how brightly it comes in, where it eventually lands. The moment is so specific. For anyone who has seen this light (and here I think of Emily Dickinson’s famous first line, “There’s a certain Slant of light”), this moment is so familiar. Heavenly Hurt, it gives us.
My mother knows about the moon. Born in a village in the south of China, she promptly shucked the country and grew up in the French district of Shanghai. I’ve seen black-and-white photos of her there with braids down to her hips, riding a bicycle, or leaning out of her balcony. During the revolution, she, like many others, was sent away to work on the farms. Much too rural for a city girl. When I visited China in 2008, I followed my mother and saw the small house where she had briefly stayed. It was a hot day and we clutched parasols to save us from the sun. Inside the home was cool and upon entering, I looked up to see a portrait of my great-grandmother hanging high from the wooden beam. So much happens between lifting one’s head and then lowering it. My mother looked up and said nothing. Sometimes there are just spaces. Sometimes brightness doesn’t have anywhere to land.
&nb sp; * * *
I started work on my book Peeling Rambutan soon after I returned from China. By then I had seen many different moons: on a bus rumbling down to my parents’ villages, in Hong Kong as I roamed the city hunting for temples, after a late dinner at a Mamak stall in Kuala Lumpur. So much is carried through moonlight. Though I have been gone nearly twenty years, I still think that the moon looks most natural when it lands in the backyard of my childhood home.
The epigraph that opens Peeling Rambutan is a poem not by Li Bai, but his contemporary, Wang Wei. I found it while reading about emptiness in Chinese poetry.
empty mountain / not see people
but hear /people speak / sound
returning light / enter deep wood
again shine / green moss / top3
Until then, I had only read translations already rounded out and smoothed over in English. Suddenly, the word-for-word version was no longer obscure but became a relief and a comfort. The breaks in each line reminded me of the fractured dialects I grew up with, the skipping from language to language, the acrobatic ear. “The poem does not tell the reader much,” scholar Ming Dong Gu writes of Wang Wei, and continues, “it is practically blank.”4 The slashes marked off empty space—space that was poetic and necessary. Wang Wei’s poem reminded me of the recurring conversations I had with my family’s ghosts while an ocean away, as I tried to put together some hiccupped notion of home. I recognized the faltering English as my own.
In my first attempt to understand Li Bai, when I asked my mother to translate, I took the wrong approach and stubbornly relied on literality for meaning. After she explained the first line, I foolishly asked, “But where does it say ‘window’? How do you know that there’s a window?” Exasperated, she switched from Mandarin to our own dialect, Hokkien, and said, “Of course there’s a window! How else could the moonlight come in?”
* * *
They say Li Bai wandered until he died at the age of sixty-two. There are many stories about how he died, but this one is the most famous. He was drunk. Unfortunately, he was also in a boat. The moon was reflected in the water and, in his stupor, he attempted to embrace it. Instead of looking up, this time Li Bai looked down to see the pale orb floating closer than it had ever been. I wonder what he was thinking then. Arms wide, he stumbled into the moon and drowned.
Fauna
Somewhere
it unravels,
lands furled upon moss,
snagged in the spider’s web,
or sits dewed upon long blades of morning.
It breaks dormancy
roots and shoots
to meet tinselled cheeps
and the uncertain step of a fawn.
At each point
where cygnets touch nest, touch water,
or horns graze birch and brush,
is a whisper that flits forward,
glow upon glow,
affirming what’s buried beneath.
No one tells you
that the ark was made of light
each cubit knotted and dazzled
and while the world was daring to die
from each icicle and sprig
they came, two and two,
in them the breath of light.
Prayer
Trimmed baby hairs tossed in the backyard
now curl in a nest.
Moss limes the bark.
Beneath the sudden rays, ice laces the heads of hedges.
The glaucous leaves of the carnations are fringed with melting snow.
When did they find the time to survive?
It’s almost May and we’re still lamenting
the languid spell of winter.
When panicked, grant me
the unshakable calm of flowers.
Ten Transitions
after 思恺
Welcoming Spring
The thunderstorm comes at night; what’s left of the snow disappears.
By bright morning, the bushes flutter with colourful finches.
Audacity
Dozens of children delight in the piano inside the ice cream shop.
One by one, they bend and plunk the keys. Beams of sound warm the room.
Tomorrow’s Spring Equinox
For a few days, the sky warmed up. Leftovers of ice and snow.
Yesterday, a hurricane touched down, sweeping the yard and burying boots.
Leaves green, flowers flower, and yet the branches are bald.
How common the unexpected. How elusive both luck and mishap.
Ontario Sleet
Rain dropped in the night, glazing the cables and branches with ice.
Disaster sparkles, translucent. So many are cold, so cold.
Visiting Burrard Inlet
A skiff slowly leaves the shore. The city’s beauty sprawls before me,
as if the jade halls suddenly became earthbound and I stare out from Buddha’s peak.
A thousand hectares of ripples lead to the sea, carrying ten thousand tons of cargo.
A biting breeze blows past. My heart scorches like the hottest day in China.
Out and About
When the grey rain lingers, go out and buy vegetables.
Handpick lotus roots and winter melon. Drag your brimming trolley home.
Thoughts on Reading Poems
The old neighbours are complaining: the melons in the yard—wasted again.
Born from the frigid air of the north, the snow geese will not return to the nest.
First Day of Autumn
Summer recedes once again for autumn, receiving the maple and the cardinal.
The grizzled and golden wind is keen with meaning; the seasons—too short to be selfish.
Squamish, B.C.
The cable car angles for the mountaintop. Summer takes in a full breath. Forest, verdant pine, stands tall, while the sun waits on snow peaks. The stream makes its way seaward. The mellow wind sweeps over it all. A shadow leans against the railing. My granddaughter’s arms open, seeking. I stoop, wary, an aged bull beside the calf.
Snow Festival
A cold wave overwhelms, and nothing can pierce the soil.
The pool cools the bones and seagulls play tricks.
In the distance, the slopes of snow-capped mountains are gilded.
Daylight is brief; tomorrow morning, read this again, carefully.
To Draw Water
The traditional Chinese practice of naming dates back to the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC), during China’s Bronze Age. The elders of a family would first compose a short verse called a generation poem. Each word in the poem corresponds to a single generation and makes up part of a family member’s name, which is typically composed of two Chinese characters. With each emerging generation, the poem moves forward a word, following the established sequence.
In time, as family members spring up, buds shooting forth one after the other, they eventually find themselves winding around that final line break and proceeding to the last word. Once that happens, the poem can be repeated from the beginning again, or extended with new verse. Poems and lineages are recorded, leaving space in anticipation. There is plenty of time to accommodate future progeny and to consider the next line. A single iteration of a poem forty-two characters long, for example, can last a family just over a thousand years, assuming they procreate successfully every thirty years.
The intimacy of the family becomes the intimacy of a poem, lines and lineages memorized. In a village, one could hear another’s name, know to which family and generation he belonged, and determine immediately his seniority within a clan, as well as who his brother, father, and grandfather are just based on an excerpted phrase. A making of sense. To have a name was to be part of a poem, alive and engaged with words before and always in wait for words to come.
