From somewhere invisible
The crow kicks aside blocks of autumn cloud with its toes
And dives into the sky in my eyes hung with the wind and the light
The sign of the crow sulphur brew of a nun of black night
Croaking and piercing a hole in a flocking bird mattress
To perch on a branch in my heart
Just as in the days of my youth conquering
Crows' nests in the treetops of my home town
My hands will never again touch that autumn landscape
Hands scaling another tall tree intending to pluck another crow
From its darkness
Crow once it was a kind of bird meat a pile of feathers and entrails
Now a desire for narrative the impulse to speech
And perhaps it is self-consolation in the face of adversity
Escape from a mass of inauspicious shadow
This kind of labour is invisible compared to childhood days
Reaching with my bravest hand into black nests
Full of pointed beaks this is even more difficult
When a crow perches in the wilds of my heart
What I wish to give voice to is not is
Symbol not its metaphor or its mythology
What I wish to give voice to is crow just as in years gone by
I never found dove in a crow's nest
Since childhood my hands have been
Covered in the thick calluses of language
But as a poet I have never given voice to a crow
With the circumspection and far-sightedness of age
Proficiency in various inspirations styles and rhymes
Just as when one begins to write
Dipping the brush deep into the ink-well
I thought that the syllables had to be drenched
In black from the very start to handle this crow
Skin flesh and bones the flows of the blood as well as
The flight-paths disclosed in the sky all drenched in black
A crow begins in this blackness in
Flight towards an outcome drenched in black
From the moment of birth it enters into solitude and prejudice
Into universal persecution, pursuit and capture
No bird it is crow
In a world full of evil every single second
Ticks its ten thousand pretexts in
The name of the forces of light or beauty
Guns are trained on this living
Representative of the powers of darkness and fired
But for all that it cannot escape beyond the bounds of crow-being
Neither fly higher encroaching on eagle territory
Nor condescend to the lowly realm of the ants
Cave-maker of the skies both its own black hole and black drill-bit
On high and alone from the heights of a crow
It sets a course according to its bearings its time its passengers
It is one happy-go-lucky big-mouthed crow
And outside it the world is a mere fabrication
No more than the boundless inspiration of crow
You people the vastness of the land and
The sky the vastness beyond the vastness
You people Yu Jian and ensuing generations of readers
Are nothing but food in the nest of a crow
I thought that a few dozen words would be enough to handle this crow
Description has made it a black box in words
But I do not know who holds the key to the box
Who thinks up secret codes in crow-darkness
In another description it appeared as a priest wearing puttees
Beneath the mighty walls of Heaven,
This holy one in search of an entrance
But I know now that the abode of the
Crow is closer to God than the priest's
Perhaps while perched on the spire of a church one day
It saw the fair body of the Nazarene
When I describe the crow as a swan
Nourished on the everlasting blackness of night
The actual bird shining with the light of a
Swan flies past that radiant swamp beside me
And at once I lose all faith in this metaphor
I attach the verb to descend to its wings
Yet it soars to the Ninth Heaven like a jet
I call it taciturn and it immediately comes to rest on wordless
As I look at this lawless wild witch-bird
A swarm of verbs is drawn to my head crow verbs
I cannot utter tongue fastened down with rivets
I see them speeding up into the sky vaulting
Diving down into the sunlight then gathering again above the clouds
Leisurely and carefree forming crow-motion pictures
That day, like a hollow-hearted scarecrow
I stood in an empty field
And all my thoughts were steeped in crow
I clearly sensed that crow felt its dark flesh
Its dark heart but I could not escape the sunless fortress
As it soared so I soared
How would I ever get back out of crow in order to catch it
That day when I looked up into the blue
Sky each crow was already drenched in darkness
A corpse-eating crowd I should have turned a
Blind eye earlier in the sky of my home town
I stalked them once so innocent then
A whiff of the stink of death and I'd panic and loosen my grip
As for the sky I should have kept my eyes on the skylarks white cranes
How I love and understand those beautiful angels
But one day I saw a bird
An ugly bird the colour of crow
Hanging from the grey ropes of the sky
With mangled legs stiff and straight as the limbs of a puppet
In crooked flight on the slopes of the sky
Circling a centre of some kind out tracing
An enormous insubstantial circle
And I heard a chorus of ominous cawings
Suspended somewhere out of sight
And I wanted to say something
To declare to the world that I was not afraid
Of those invisible sounds