Spring '06

 

 

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Liquid Glass

He beckons her to follow. They descend into the dim basement. Black marbles, granite, white, pink, orange albasa, green chert, each speaking its own tongue. He sprays water on a stone, tracing its patterns and oxidized surface. Stars fly from his calloused fingers.

How small is the crack between rocks
How large is the space for love 

Red-hot magma cools off then hardens into rocks; rocks eroded into stones, stones into sand, sand into soil, then rocks again at the bottom of the sea. 

So thin is the inner wall of glass
No grain of sand can seep in 

Pebble: a crossroad from billion years ago  

Green chert: skeletons of organisms hardened together with silicic acid 

Trees repeat trees
We repeat history
Learning like seasons
Face raised
Shards of sunlight sail in the woods 

That feeling of stone in hand...that smell…that taste…that color and shape of groundmass polished to a section…that accumulation of strata slumbering under dark forests…that miraculous sculpture through millions of years of splashing…that breathing of minerals…endless sea of summer light-- that order of the universe… that wonder and awe…impossible to say in words…all said in a stone 

Liquid glass
A window stands
Then falls into a puddle
Through time


The Collector 

Everyday
He comes at 3:00
To this new-rich neighborhood
Not a minute early, not a minute late
His home-made uniform crispy? blue in the summer sun
His tricycle tailored perfectly for the vocation
He parks three feet away from the colored bins—
Orange for kitchen, blue for recycle, black for the rest
Slowly puts on gloves
His confidence greater than a surgeon
his face as calm as a general
reviewing his soldiers before a battle 

He opens the orange lid--a yellow jacket
flies into his face, then flees like a drunk
He laughs, bends over the bin--
His patched pants opening like sunflowers
Cans and bottles are pulled out one by one--
Coke, Sprite, Real Peach Juice, Wahaha Spring
Red-headed flies moan loudly over the oozing brown
And he wipes the waste—plastic, glass, aluminum—
with equal passion, just like a mother
cleaning the noses of her beloved urchins 

“How much do they pay you for this job?”
I throw open the window—a question
itching my throat since I arrived in Beijing
He lays a sparkling can in his cart
So tender as if it were a rose, a new-born
“I’m a garbage man,” he says, laughing
his voice as clear as the bottles he just cleaned
“My job will never get me a mansion or a car
like this,” he points to the Mercedes parked
outside the villas in the Pear Blossom Garden
“But it fills our rice bowls, sends our son
to a good school. My hands may get
filthy, but my heart is clean
and I sleep like a baby, next to my wife.” 

He laughs, showing
all the brown teeth that remain?
 

Wang Ping was born in China and came to USA in 1985. Her publications include American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), all from Coffee House Press. New Generation: Poetry from China Today (1999), an anthology she edited and co-translated, is published by Hanging Loose Press. Her new book, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000), is from University of Minnesota Press, and won the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities. In 2002, Random House published its paperback. Her second book of poetry, The Magic Whip, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in the fall, 2003. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts for poetry, Minnesota State Arts Board for fiction, and the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry. She is associate professor of English at Macalester College.

Copyright Wang Ping 2006