Attachment: for Helena Qi Hong
1/ 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
2/ Double Nesting
You are a bird, always in search of a nest
(An open cage?), where your body & soul
Can both come down to perch for the cold
And long night, no matter how far or high
You’ve been flying during the day
Yes, just as her vagina is the nest of your
Penis, her love is that of your soul
In the Moment : for Qi Hong
Where yin and yang
run into each other
Where the Atlantic and the Pacific
meet
Where a fallen leaf is blown up and
flies like a bird
Where she reveals
her fair and shapely shoulders to you
Where a pile of scrambled words
assemble themselves into a line
Where an ant tries to cross a crack
in the cemented pavement
Where you hide the fragments
of a collaged photo of you two
Where he enters to make love
while she is talking dirty with you
Now is the moment in which
to set your selfhood in mindfulness
Note: The poem above was not submitted flush left, but this digital format cannot accommodate complex lineation.
Zen Secret about Happiness
Less = more, as many know it
But few can do this calculation in deed:
Whereby you can maximize your happiness
By reducing your desires to the minimum
As the denominator of everything you already
Have for your outer existence; in other words
Happiness = haves / wants
—Submitted on 09/24/2022
Yuan Changming (pen name of Wuming Yuan) published several monographs on translation before leaving China. With Allen Yuan, he edits Poetry Pacific. His poems have appeared in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English: Tenth Anniversary Edition (Tightrope Books, 2017) and Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2014), as well as in Literary Review of Canada, London Magazine, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Threepenny Review, and other journals.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
