Darko R. Suvin [TEN POEMS FROM "THE LONG MARCH"]:

        END OF THE MILLENNIUM

Plump loll the plums, still seven are left

Whatever is to be seen better be seen soon

While the seeing's good.

Plump fall the plums, still three are left

Whatever is to be known better be known by now

While the knowing's good.

Plump lie the plums, in shallow baskets

Whatever's to be embraced better be embraced

While the embracing's good.

                                                        482

                            ***

         TO A HEDGEHOG

(COUNTERPROJECT TO CHU CHEN PO)

You nose about, circumspect and compact,

When smelling a threat, you stop and curl up.

Tho' small and warm, nobody will slap you around,

You are no mouse or shrew, your quills are sharp.

The quills grow out of you and into you,

They do not hurt, they have grown to be you.

                                                    4184

                            ***

    SOME ESTHETICS ON A SUMMER MORNING

                                                Because of Sonja M.

    1.

Poetry puts its trust in lustful sounding figures

Whose birth bursts the bounds of similarity.

Poetry is conceived with language, true, a transmittal of forms,

A communally presupposed tryst with truth under the stars,

But it breaks up the language of nation and tradition,

Subverts, like music, posed conceptual systems.

Poetry is nowise meaningless, but its meanings

Resemble the significance of the revolving star-clusters:

The beliefs of the tribe etch in the figures

On the vault of the brain and of heavens at night.

Poetry loves wisdom more than nature does,

The worlds of poetry justify their inhabitants.

    2.

The verse-smith must work in words and lines

but the poem is also made up of the blanks

the writer can go meet a poem

but the poem must have already been near

the poetry is in the inexhaustible

above underneath between words

                                                25682

                            ***

               HER SONG

    1.

Night unending. I run the treadmill of my thoughts.

A tramp moon picks the tough cloud lint.

Of all the people in the revolving world

How come I think only of you?

Far off in the night I hear someone call.

Hopeless, I eagerly whisper, "Yes".

    2.

You have often seen the wind

Blow peach blossoms off the trees.

Have you ever seen the wind

Blow them back onto the trees?

    3.

You set my heart up for bait

You leave it to the tigers of expectation.

                                        161284

                            ***

BEAR CITY BLUES: A TRIPTYCH

If one forgot one lived at world's end

The bird would sing as it sang in the Palace of old.

Bai Juyi, On Hearing the Oriole (C.E. 816)

1. Returning to Bear City

I grew up in Bear City

I was in my thirties when I left it for good.

This year, revisiting,

My childish games rise up whole and undimmed.

            Gingerly walks the hare

Swift the years, beyond recall,

Something is taking its irreversible course.

Streets stand as before

But the bodies of my youth have leapt into another shape.

            Gingerly walks the hare

The buildings may be the same

But the beholder's eye looks thru new lenses.

Where formerly all was single,

Now shallows appear beneath depths, or shallow gives way to deep.

            Gingerly walks the hare

Alone unchanged, Bear River

Turbidly pursues its goddam prehistoric silting.

Progressively, the mind purges itself:

These last years, many nights on end, I have not dreamt of home.

            Gingerly walks the hare

2. Thinking of Bear City

I have long not been in Bear City, I wonder

How many times the midday cannon has boomed

From Thieves' Hill. I know that high white clouds

Have gathered and then wandered on since I last saw

Lilacs in my old garden bloom, but into whose window

Does the moonlight enter tonight?

3. Flow City

A whole lifetime of reflecting about Bear City.

From time to time I fly in briefly

On official errands. Wealth and honors

Drifting clouds, white and high.

Look up, look around, forty years

Whooshing by like an express train

With lighted windows. White beard,

People all strange, old friends

And unknowns, few still recognize

This queer fish, odd fellow citizen.

                                    582-886

[NOTE: My native city of Zagreb lies under Medvednica, Bear Mountain; nearby you can still see some ruins of Medvedgrad, Bear City.]

                            ***

                IN MEMORIAM: PETER WEISS,

        THE GOOD PERSON OF THE THIRD WAY

                                                For Stockholm, 1964

Playwright below by Elysian Springs,

Do you debate with old Bert and Jacques Roux?

Your song of Hell still glows and stings:

It teaches to see by taking a stand,

With it we learn to understand,

And having seen, to resist--like you.

                                            82-86

                            ***

        FOUR TANKAS...

Unfair Universe

Even white cranes, tall pines,

live but a brief gross of swift

years. Even a crimson

flower, golden butterfly,

only a few warm, long months.

Hiroshige's Iris Garden at Horikiri +/

Long stalks in foreground

open up huge petals, white and purple.

Low between pointed

leaves, across a brook, wander

tiny accidental people.

[+/ "Hiroshige's Iris Garden..." first appeared in the magazine Amelia (second prize for Oriental Forms)]

Les Très Riches Heures

Ocean waves ceaseless

roll on to the shore. No day

is nightless. Even in

my dreams, I meet you by stealth,

snatching up the rare rich hours.

For a Theatre Critic

Your Self, complex play:

describe it with cool justice,

that it play better;

shameless warmth, that your absorbed

audience trust the critic.

...AND ONE HAIKU

Four lumps of sugar

In the coffee: desperate

Love of life's sweet poison.

                                    5-884

                            ***

        FLOWERING POETS

"Let a hundred flowers bloom" is not a bad line:

Let us praise the poet Mao, ruler of Chungkuo state

Thirty years ago. "Let a thousand branches flower

In due sequence" is a much better line, it

Gathers in seasonal functioning and the further

Nourishing fruits to come from the fertile beauty:

Let us praise thrice the poet Po Chü-i, governor general

Of Chungchou eleven hundred and sixty years ago.

Nine times however let us praise those poet governors

That actually tended the flowers, grew the fruit,

Implementing thus, yesterday or tomorrow,

Any day and wherever, their exemplary interpretation.

                                                        7-883

                            ***

            TEACH

    1. (The Analects)

Old knowledge is handed down by pious application

New events are noted by boldly pouncing awareness;

A present besieged by possible futures and pasts

Is transfixed into life by a Teacher.

    2. (Parentheses)

Sometimes one wonders why one keeps on. To look into

Young faces is pleasant but not enough, nor are the long

Vacations. Perhaps the isolation from bloodier business?

The time to think? But is that all? The classics

Say that (s)he who breaks up the heavy clods

With rakes and pulls the hurdle harrow, helps

The cultures much; nor is s(he) seen with disfavour

By the god(dess) of blonde hair from the (hi)storied heavens.

                                                        82-84

                            ***

            EPITAPH

The gods came down briefly one brisk morning

He kept busy the whole day to avoid mourning.

                                                29185

                            ***

Copyright (C) 1987 by Darko R. Suvin

All Rights Reserved.

For reprint rights, inquire at darko.suvin@tin.it