Abandoned House
There the steps are purple
There the plants are red sunbirds
There the stones grow human faces
There the steps are purple
There the plants are red sunbirds
There the stones grow human faces
I often pass that place
In varying states of anxiety
I’ve always been weak in the dusk
While that abandoned house shuts its eyes tight
I stand there and stare
Watching the agonized rays of daylight sliding from its body
Mumbling to myself, my heart racing
My footsteps make a circle, and a nameless and contagious sorrow
Shoots from the rooftop and moves through my mind
Like a name too high to climb
Like a gift savored in solitary splendor and a painting
Like a piece of glass spreading lifelessness and refinement all around
There everything is like a rumor
And heatstruck lamps are part of the conspiracy
There it will be proven later: nothing more remains
I arrive I approach I trespass
Harboring a temper I’ve never disclosed
Living like an urn filled with ash
Its proud days lie buried in dust
Just as this is an abandoned house
I am myself
(1984, revised 1994)
Zhai Yongming is a Chinese poet from Chengdu. After being sent away for two years during the Cultural Revolution to do manual labor in the countryside, she returned to Chengdu. In 1981 she began to publish her poems. She has been invited to international conferences and poetry festivals in several countries in Europe and lived in the United States from 1990 to 1992.
Andrea Lingenfelter is a Bay Area–based writer, scholar of Chinese literature, and translator of fiction (including Farewell My Concubine and Candy) and poetry (including the 2012 Northern California Book Award–winning collection The Changing Room: Selected Poems of Zhai Yongming). A 2014 NEA Translation Grant awardee and 2013–14 Kiriyama Fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim at the University of San Francisco, she is translating Wang Anyi’s novel Scent of Heaven and Hon Lai Chu’s The Kite Family.
