Otherself

      

By Yuan Changming

my crow, my other life   Every morning, even before I open My eyes, the little doors of the cage My crow cannot wait to flutter out Into the light-washed heavens Striking its transparent wings into beating   Every night, even after I put The cage back inside my cozy house The bird still glides close to the moon With its wings feathered with spirits Forgetting to return home   Sometimes I wonder why Day after day, night after night It refuses to settle softly in its cage Like a domesticated parrot   Were I it, would I ?   Or you, once the cage broken Would the bird return Coo itself into sleep, dreaming   Of celestial freedom? the meditation master takes a nap As he began to cross his legs on each other, his otherself Was wandering nowhere between here and there; he Withdrew his vision from the skyline of the city To the cool fire burning in his belly; listening To the whistling and whishing of traffic, he heard only His own pulse. With the breeze came the odor of garlic But he held his breath, while leaving all his inner doors And windows ajar, letting his sensations travel freely He believed in Qi, which was circulating with his blood And his feeling and his thought. The light dimmed A baby crow was flapping by. He found himself totally Lost in a temple among puti trees within his yellowish Skin. That was all the harmony of yin and yang he knows.   afterlife: a parallel poem Like a goat fleeing from the zoo My trueself wandered afar Into the heart of darkness, where I saw Milton’s Satan struggling With agonies, while swarms of spirits Trembling amid a black fire Following Dante’s steps, I tried to Find Yuan Wang, the supreme ruler Of the underworld, hoping to Exchange my soul For his little brushpen (he uses to keep his registry book Much like Dr. Faust selling his For worldly knowledge   My majesty, I began to negotiate But there is no registry here The king said, just suffering subjects. Meanwhile, others are also trying to Greet him in an endless queue Here I find no classes No sexes, no age or racial differences Except human souls drifting into A huge alchemic furnace, where They are boiled with conceptions Until we all evaporate above the ground Like mists, on a sunny summer morning   This is neither escape nor astray   weekend walking  On a sunny Saturday afternoon I would lead my inner selfhood Out of my small rented room To the Fraser River Valley Park To let it play with other dogs Running and jumping wildly Catching the ball each time I threw Into the air, the tree shade, the ditch The bank, the water, and sometimes The ridge, where it sometimes stopped and stood Looking beyond the horizon, as if to join the wild Becoming one and the same with the little could Drifting freely around, under the western sky your cup Whatever contains h2o, the origin of life, could Be contained in it, always ready for another fill   Whether it is bubbling with heat, or Chilled with sandy juice, it can hold   Any fluid with all the calmness that will push down Impurities into the bottom as unwanted sediments   Most tolerant, and most receptive: green tea Black coffee, red wine, fresh blood, sour milk   You are jealous of it, a container ready to hold even The heaviest water, and would love to be more like it   In spirit, as you take it to your lips, closer to your heart Like these words that are trying to contain your spirit self-portraying: one word can be worth even more than 10,000 pictures though many people would allege the opposite is true In-Lightened Yuan Changming grew up in an isolated village, started to learn the English alphabet in Shanghai at age 19 and published monoragpohs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 2 for fiction as well as 16 chapbooks and appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), among 2,019 others across 49 countries. A poetry judge for Canada's 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write and publish fiction in 2022, with his first (hybrid) novel Bamakoola: Paradise Regained forthcoming in 2025.