Unravelment

      

By Yuan Changming

Gathering                          Sitting at the every table Is a rearranged array Of familiar shapes of Strange bodies (or Strange shapes of Familiar bodies)   Silhouetting boisterously Against night. Reflecting From the glass are Different colors of your Friends’ voices speaking From disparate distances One from Vancouver, another From Jingzhou, a third from Melbourne. When the party Ends in the midnight They’ll all withdraw into Ghostly existences, some- Where as far away from The present as from This spot of being Like one of your whims Bubbling only to break Love Unravelled   You have never had enough of love Such as for Qi Hong, for Yiming For Liao Hengxiang, as well As for the pepper, acorn tofu & carpcakes From your native village in Jinzhou For music, light or classic, for songs Sung by humans and birds alike For poetry by Su dongpo, by Guo Xiaochuan By John Keats, by Lorna Crozier For the hills at Zhangjiajie, the water In Lake Louise, the trees & flowers anywhere For whatever is truth or beauty, just as you have fallen Passionately in love (again) with someone After 42 years of separation, in Deed, you never run short of love For a human being as for nature Be she a standing for herself Or for the whole human race   Natural Syllogism & Zen Epiphany   When I was a country lad in Mayuhe I saw both the mountain as it looked   & you as Xisi, the beauty in my eyes                                Well on my journey towards Taoist Dao I recalled the mountain fitfully as it turned out And you as one of the prettiest girls ever seen    Now almost at my final destination I have come to realize the mountain as is & you as my soulmate, or first & last love Unravelling Love in Insomnia   In this Expansive  Moment of Post-midnight There are all The muted Sounds of Thought Hauling An indefinitely Prolonged Trail of feel Like a train Running with Endless cars On a rail Stretching afar Beyond The morning glow Final Finding: the True Worth of My Life   Ever since retirement, I’ve been trying to Examine & re-examine my life In hope of digging some worth As Socrates has advised us to   Alas, to my great embarrassment, I find I am neither smart nor handsome, desirous Of everything but good at nothing, thus Having done nothing special, made no Contributions to society, let alone history   Time and again, I cannot help wondering: How have I managed to survive in so many years Without being good at anything at all…?   Aha, after years of thinking I now know the reason lies In the way I am always good at Eating & & excreting In particular                  I was gifted with human rights!   [Author’s note: this group of unravelling poems is inspired by Helena Qi Hong (祁红).]     Bio: Born and bred in an isolated Chinese village, Yuan Changming holds a Canadian PhD in English and co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include 16 chapbooks, 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and 2129 other publications across 51 countries. Yuan began writing and publishing fiction in 2022, his debut (hybrid) novel Detaching and 'silver romance' The Tuner both published recently by Alien Buddha Press.