Boundary
When a boundary emerges in the dark,
metaphysics becomes important. Children know this
even before the falling snow makes the hedges stand out,
even before a tree falls dully in the woods.
Existence is nearly a transparent slope,
the swarming plankton of snowflakes rising endlessly.
And so they see farther, in the drafty attic,
gazing through the window at the empty swing set.
They watch pedestrians shrink against the wind,
staring deep into the woods
where their parents dig holes, first with pickaxes, then spades,
trying to vanish inside them—starving.
They carry away the family's entire supply of salt in coarse sacks,
to thank the hardened earth, and to return to their children.
~
Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D., representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986, including 9 poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose, including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell, Williams, Ashbery and Rosanna Warren. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024), comprising 1178 poems, celebrates 40 years of writing poetry.
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