After Du Fu’s “Climbing the Heights”

How yesterday’s thoughts caught in a fish net
can interrogate a nation: to scatter soil and know
that in my tradition, soil formed humans:
rake the leaves that whistle in the wind
then flower: the long river comes on churning:
in hardship I bitterly resent my tangled,

frost-white locks, thinking time: to be entangled
in its endless long hair: to be on the Internet
where a four-year-old set my stomach churning
blowing off his father’s head: who knows
what brings danger: returning too late: a wind
and a thin twig: in 1643, a drought in Hunan

killed millions: as soldiers in Beijing manned
the sleepy, forbidden gate: as bureaucrats tangoed
on paper, calligraphing poems, their sleeves stirring up a wind
in the provinces: a typhoon in the counties: where fishnet
stockings are built, 381 years later, by firm hands that know
and feel all: at 3:02AM a woman wakes to the churning

of the sea: at 4:51AM a man dreams of an urn
into which he falls, making no sound: how humane
to die in silence: to leave a sweatshop of NO₂
for a heaven of yes: Gucci bags: reeds untangling
as a freighter barges in: a janitor wakes for his net
daily gains: a contract: a confusion: but hear the wind

accomplicing: two scooters crash and riders unwind
loads of Shanghainese cusses: a real, burning,
capitalized desire: to howl: like wind beating
against my door, this night I write: my broken hood
called for this: when anyone might wake up to strangle
their boss: when a flower blooming not long ago

is now specked by exhaust: a novelist cleans her elbows:
an editor smokes, looking at himself, double-chinned
in the sink: it’s 2024, and he doesn’t like her angled
shoulders, how, when she’s on top, light burns
her face slowly, making it oily: as we’re human,
are we capable of love: or beauty: or in sweat,

forgiveness: as sparrows chirp under the eaves, their tango
nonstop: she once put a dried rose in their nest
as wind rekindled his cigarette, burning it to its end.