DEAD WINTER
   
   
   
   

   
   Snow bound sleep is full of disaffected characters.
   
   
   The sky’s a nest. As evening comes,
   the sticks of darkness fall in place
   for lies and nestlings to abide,
   
   
   while in the west the sunset wall
   deep red and sexual
   arises from the well of immanence.
   
   
   Swans down does lean in the wind.
   a foreign village battens
   in itself among the raw, damp, shrinking drifts.
   
   
   The shops enchained. Not one is open.
   Iron padlocks hang in darkness.
   One key opens every one. It’s lost.
   
   
   Behind a hospital more white than snow
   upon a deep green winter lawn
   I see the lovers making out.
   
   
   The clinic doors like flower petals
   open to the patients hope and every
   kind of engine chuffs and whirrs.
   
   
   Bed sheets top the whitecaps
   of a killing, arctic harbor.
   A violinist who’s been commissioned to
   
   
   commemorate the chief of medicine
   takes flight into his darkness
   amid rags of music. Memory
   
   
   our own. The elders on the harbor
   in their cerements appear. A great steam vessel
   ferries them in a mirage, a dearly loved ones,
   
   
   out of life: an artificial harbor operated
   by an old style ten key tap and crank
   account machine. No room for imagination there.
   
   
   Manufactured goods and ledger books
   with garbage run upon the tide with barges
   of tin cans. A virus on the rampage rises
   
   
   overtaking plastic trash and auto parts and spent syringes
   on the slack, low water tide of an abandoned beach.
   Each day is violent and tiring.
   
   
   Repeat. The exit ramp, ourselves, the bitter chill.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   XUE DI
   trans by Hil Anderson and Stephen Thomas