Juegos Prohibidos

by Yang Mu

Noontime
The leaves at the window
screen lightly shudder,
shudder with some sort of feeling:
an inconceivable grand romance
(the G isn’t easy to manage, she says—
her hair slides over to the left)
She squints down at her ring finger
suffering to press a Granadan air.
A nun in the window chants the Rosary,
happens to look up—
far off, trailing past, a drifter’s horse;
that horse steps along so slowly
she’s already clicked through twelve beads
before he drifts over the horizon, Lorca would say.
Now, there, at the ranch, the mango tree
is almost ripe. The noontime feeling
again seems to bear a strung stillness,
it seems twelve years is also a stillness—
She’s finally got the G, even well enough
to manage that sort of exquisite timbre.

I hear it and then I hear a chinaberry tree
both growing taller
and dropping fruit. At first,
the time from letting go of the branch
to striking the earth was brief;
seven, twelve years later
that distance stretches out and out
(We measure with threads of spring rain, and I
am nearly unable to bear those divisions of time)
as the chinaberry vertically is cut through
by the five-lined stave of moment
after moment: tiny and low and bitter,
a tad lower, a tad more
bitter, clicking away,

ultimately, tumbling down onto the earth. She looks up
at me, wistfully listening to the unhearable leaves
at the window screen lightly, lightly shuddering—Noontime,
a white cat dozes on the patio,
last year’s autumn leaves heaped under the stairs
and those dry leaves of many years ago piled in the mind—
“finally got the G,” she says grinning, “like so . . .”
and with a deft ring finger, lightly, grass-plain openly
presses a Granadan air.
The poet opens the door and strolls
into the heart of the street, the still noon
suddenly explodes open with a gun crack, Lorca,
left speechless, would prostrate himself.

Confused, people push open windows to investigate,
toppling so many pots of pansies;
under the searing sun, a scrub chinaberry
dips down an octave,
desolately winds up
the grand romance of fractured youth.

This translation first appeared in an essay by Michele Yeh (PDF) in Literary Imagination: Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2005.