Untitled - Azam Abidov - poet and translator

ARTHUR SZE
Educated at the University of California, Berkeley Arthur Sze
is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light
(Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and he is also the editor of Chinese
Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2010). He lives in
Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA). “Pig’s Heaven Inn” is from The
Ginkgo Light by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).
Other collections by Sze include River River (1987), Dazzled
(1982), Two Ravens (1976; revised, 1984), and The Willow Wind
(1972; revised, 1981).
Pig¹s heaven inn
Red chiles in a tilted basket catch sunlight‹
we walk past a pile of burning mulberry leaves
into Xidi village, enter a courtyard, notice
an inkstone, engraved with calligraphy, filled
with water and cassia petals, smell Ming
dynasty redwood panels. As a musician lifts
a small xun to his mouth and blows, I see kiwis
hanging from branches above a moon doorway:
a grandmother, once the youngest concubine,
propped in a chair with bandages around
her knees, complains of incessant pain;
someone spits in the street. As a second
musician plucks strings on a zither, pomelos
blacken on branches; a woman peels chestnuts;
two men in a flat-bottomed boat gather
duckweed out of a river. The notes splash,
silvery, onto cobblestone, and my fingers
suddenly ache: during the Cultural Revolution,
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