Old and New Poems by Donald Hall

Author:Donald Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Photographs of China

After the many courses, hot bowls of rice,

plates of pork, cabbage, duck, and peapods,

we return to Chia-Shun’s living room,

to the fire and conversation.

Chia-Shun brings over

an old book of photographs, printed in France.

“I want to show you China,” he says,

“our China. This river”—he spreads a page flat—

“my university was beside this river.”

The river looks wide, in the sepia photograph,

maybe half a mile wide, geese floating on it, and junks.

Beyond the river, there are rolling darkening hills,

like elephant skin, like the brows of Indian elephants.

“During the war, we bathed ourselves in that river.

Oh, it was cold in the winter!”

…

Li Chi crosses the room, touching the furniture.

She sits on the sofa between us, and peers

into the pages of photographs, her glasses

nearly bumping the pages she turns.

“Here,” she says, “is West Lake, which is my home.

I always lived near the water, until now,

in Ann Arbor.” Her laugh makes a noise like paper.

“When I was first at the university, in China,

I lived so close to the water

that I could fish out my window!”

Later,

we will persuade her to sing a poem from T’ang

that she learned from her mother, in her mother’s accents.

…

We sit on the sofa, turning the pages together.

When we come to the river again, the book lies flat,

and Chia-Shun says,

“On Sundays,

I would ask my friend to help me prepare my assignment.

Then I spent all day

walking alone in the mountains.”

There were orange trees

beside the hot springs, even in frosty winter.

“How the gold shone in the green shadows then!”

…

“When I was teaching,” Li Chi says, “in another city,

the planes bombed the house where I lived.

Fortunately, I was not home at the time"—she laughs—

“but my clothes, all of my clothes,

were up in a tree.”

Chia-Shun laughs also,

and closes the book, and says,

“When I see these pictures, when I remember these things”

—he looks like a boy, wild and pink with excitement—

“I want to live two hundred years!”

And Li Chi:

“When I close my eyes, because my eyes hurt me,

then it is West Lake that I see.”

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