Burying the Mountain by Shangyang Fang

Author:Shangyang Fang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

51 / Whose hand is it that wakes me from the tree?

Whose lips inlaid in my skin? For whom am I severing

my sweet limb into whose strange body?

52/ The apple before me / never attempts to convince me / it is an apple.

A Bulldozer’s American Dream

At the construction site the bulldozer works

days & nights. No, it is the man inside who works.

The man & his machine are one. After the stars

& dogs & coffees brewed with hands of his loved one,

her night hair of soft river, of his own volition

the man chose to participate in this heavy-lifting labor.

Wrong, it’s the machine that does. No more

than twenty-five: the man, forearm knotted, grips

the handle & the machine’s hydraulic stick follows—

an extension of his body & to that extent, his mind.

His mind, as we know it, does not want to be a man,

or anything with a preconceived structure.

But how can he resist this pleasure, his thighs

harvesting, his glazed nape taut as a stag’s skin,

discharging summer rain. It is the mind that cannot

resist this sweet perk of the earth. It is the mind

that tames the bulldozer’s tender monstrosity & orders

it to pick up, with connivance, those dusk-damaged

bones for its master & dig into the deep-delved

darkness, an interior otherwise unattainable.

Some evenings, the man leaves the construction site

for steaks & candles & wine thick as plagued blood,

musing the neck of his wife, whose good flesh

is continuous as his dreams in which the earth

will never betray him, for he is its filial son,

competent at his duty: Fill the earth & subdue it.

Then the machine, without its master, lowers its bucket

in rain. Then through the hard latticework of this city,

its metal drilled by a known silence. It hurts to look at it.

A sad thing. The machine still is not a part of anything.

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