Departure: To the Tune “Mu Lan Hua: Magnolia”

After tonight, what’s left of you is you 

moving into my dream. Outside, the horse hooves

stamping the ground, the dust moves. 

No sorrowful songs for me unless I am drunk.

I am drunk. Forgive me that I couldn’t bear

to see you off, vanishing with the sun. 

Alone with the west wind and the moon. 

Alone listening to the pipa sobbing, its pegbox 

carved into a phoenix. Listen, crying bird: 

To live without this grief is to see the mountain 

without its weight, rivers without depth. 

 

--Zhang Xian

Translated from the Chinese by Shangyang Fang

V

I promised my wife that I would call Dr. Song today. After putting Mira down for her nap and slipping outside for a smoke, I lifted the receiver. The sound it emitted, which I have heard without pause countless times before, seemed to me otherworldly now, like somebody’s finger playing on the wet rim of a crystal bowl in a derelict theater before the wars.

It’s hard to say how long I stood there listening. It may have been seconds or seasons. The rings of Saturn kept turning in their groove. For reasons beyond me—our seminar had already moved on from late medieval Europe to developing world underworlds—I dialed 1-800-INFERNO, and before the first ring, a woman’s voice answered in heavily accented English.

“Is it you?”

“I think so,” I replied. Outside, the honey locusts sprinkled their pale spinning leaves in real time. Focusing on one as it fell seemed to slow the general descent.

“Oh creature, gracious and good,” the faraway lady recited, as if reading, against her will, from a prepared text, “traversing the dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood.” I could hear rain trickling in a gutter spout on the other end of the line.

“Please,” I said into the receiver, “remove my name from your list.”

 

--Srikanth Reddy 

Some of the Questions to Consider

 

Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you? It's hard to know which is worse, the nightmare of approaching tornadoes or waking from the dream your parents were alive in. Enter the ominous music announcing the shark. It is best to disappear into one's work. Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested, mentioning other things besides wine but most people ignored that part, because who wants to be drunk on virtue? Misreadings are best. Misunderstandings are also best but to be misunderstood is not the goal. I don't need drugs, I am drugs, Dali famously said, and drew his wife's face exploding into spheres. What do all these wildflowers mean? Just look, said a famous American painter who, drunk, drove his convertible off the road into the trees and flew headfirst into an oak. We're all afloat in the same solution. Would you like to trade some molecules with me? Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neutrons at them to create a chain reaction. The adult human body contains 7 octillion atoms and one picnic table. Is it time to go? Not yet, not yet. Let's meet for an aperitivo. Let's build a pineapple from all this fresh snow.   --Kim Addonizio

Nina Simone - I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (Montreux 1976)

Small Axe (1992) - Bob Marley & The Wailers

Gene Wilder - Final Monologue (Rhinoceros - 1974) (Berenger/Stanley)

Leonard Cohen - Anthem (Live in London)