Omaggio di Maria Teresa Liuzzo al poeta vietnamita VAN PHAN
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VAN PHAN
THE SOUL FLEW AWAY...
...
A spider’s hammock being torn by the lifting fog
Returns freedom to the soft tongues of grass
The drifting clouds rub out
A horizon that has just buried darkness
Blood resurrected within the ground
Turns into young sap welling up at each falling leaf
While long-suffering shadows remain silent
The thrush bursts out a firework of calls
Buds are shooting up dividing walls
As arteries of streams clear and circulate
Tongues made of glass break into voices
To discuss each discolored photo
The words in a notebook having dreamed of fire
Just before they become ashes, suddenly come to
When moving out, one has tossed the incense sticks’ leftovers into the river
So one wonders why fragrant smoke still lingers…
(Translated from Vietnamese by Nhat-Lang Le
Edited by Susan Blanshard)
WIND CREST
I.
Crawling on sharp tops of the rock
Body of wind scratches
Blood of wind is rain
Sunshine drips down
Mountains roll the kiss up high
Gray clouds cast into black
Mountains open wide their arms, trampling feet into ground
Crushing into fragments
Tears the body of wind into pieces
The starlight falling
Morning bursting out
Up to the top of slope in a flash
Open eyes look down
The kisses heaped higher
The frenzied wind rolls up on another crest.
II.
Finding your mouth to sow
Wind clinging to tender limbs of land
Plunge down to the abyss
Rot the bowels of hills and mountains
Chest of wind drifting
Playing on the ground
The shell cracked flash
Spring overflows the grain mouth
Waiting to sprout the cotyledons
Wind will carry the ground away.
III.
Shut tight the door the more wind blows
Things suddenly remembered, tighten in my chest
The eye of wind swept me into you
Turning quickly round and round
Swiftly passing a bridge
My body was bent by the wind
Hung like a wet towel across the railing
Dripping down into a swift-flowing river.
Remembering how the train cuts through a body of wind
Columns of smoke overturn and siren sounds disappear in an instant
My breath is constrained through the trumpet-reed
The pressure like an eagle wings spreading wide
Raising fragile dragonfly wings
Cavalier on the wind’s crest
Outside the vault of leaf disorder
Torn to satisfy the frenzied excitement
This inhibition of lust.
(Translated from Vietnamese by Trần Nghi Hoàng
Edited by Frederick Turner)
