(Droplet) – lurid rags of silk

© Kechun Zhang in Between the Mountains and Water

Saint-Saëns — my father still says — was garniture for fatuous men and their gold-laden alcoves, veiled by a cordon of ludic dins; Milosz was flour of similar grain, a bargainer of truisms, a mute chaff coated by wooden beads. I liked them, I liked their touch, their texture, I see it as the texture of heavy rubber boots threading a pavement composed by shards of glass. There is a pearlescent quality to all humble objects of life, a glimmer of sorts, and all sorts of glimmer, as that of dew wept from acanthus leaves, the unstinting mist out of every breath in every wintry dawn, in the fox’s scan over the woodland; all which transiently shines akin to gold, without a droplet of pretension for being so. That is the unbridled beauty that exsanguinates the heart, the ars poetica of our ending realm, which labours yearningly under a sun to sun merely to purport effortlessness. The levity of the natural mechanism is shouldered by an indelible effort.

Many suns ago (yet still, fewer so), I would commonly peer with hyaline gaze at a poplar whose branches had grown near my window. A warbler would come by, and I wanted to be an author, unknown to mensuration, unknown to corrals, shrouded from torpor and hypostasis, and I wanted my book in shape of that warbler, free from the lassitude of grounds, even free of words — no, no words, merely feathers, some cinereal, some of torrid yellow, few to blend the hues — and no bindings, only a pair of immovable black marbles, no strings nor vaticinations. Perhaps it would peck at the temples, and serve only as a petty victory to the one that manages to clumsily open the blinds and defenestrate it. And, as the warbler took to wind and with wind flew, I had little victory of my own. Returned to the tendance of humble glistens, I’m my own earthly man, my own end of the world, exulted by fibres of glass sticking to my knees, envious of my own fullness, enamoured by the perfunctory scope of my agonies; returned to the tendance of this world which ends while it faintly glistens. I’m the garniture of higher men, the gold-tint of their cordons of fools, the torrent of circumlocutory pleas, and nothing nearly as unworthy as to be written, nothing nearly as light as I’d have it be, like the warbler and his poplar tree.

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
(…)
And those who expected lightning and thunder
are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits the rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
(…)

Czeslaw Milosz, A Song On The End of The World, Warsaw, 1944