Yongkang Lu, Shanghai’s former French Concession, July 19, 2013
“Banker Wins”
We have nothing in that
fanciful or speculative relation
The gap between our ears — the air
that vibrates with these words
Vocal cords to ear drums, the nerve
bundles, signal-to-noise, our
Ratio, the incentive to know
one another’s minds
Drop predictable experience
here, abandon all hope
Of anything but change
O — O — the poetic O of apostrophe
Thinking one could know,
understand? Let us try again: I
Was six when I first read, I think,
of the firebombing of Dresden
At seven I felt a rush
at the sight of a blonde
Pinup below the cockpit
desert-pink camouflaged B‑25
*
back to Yongkang Lu, where and old skinny Shanghainese man in a wife-beater walks by the Old Bubbles Café in cheap sky-blue plastic sandals, foot catching in a plastic bag, the thin gray kind that wrap big eight-liter water bottles, he kicks it off his foot and shuffles on in the bright August heat as inside the café at the next table a chunky graying goateed Englishman and two heavy young women — Belgian? — talk marketing, the blonde woman saying, “we weren’t too happy with the photographer we used at the gala ball — I gave him a clear briefing to get everything we have branded on the tables and picturepicturepicture! but then later we had to Photoshop everything in anyway…” as a fireplug of a middle-aged Shanghainese woman – old enough to have been a Red Guard, perhaps – trundles past in a t‑shirt brightly declaring: LIFE IS REPEATED
*
though neither Shi Daoyuan’s early eleventh-century The Transmission of the Lamp nor any Song-era Pure Land Buddhist documents mention Changlu Zongze’s “Rules of Purity” code (the earliest known guide to seated meditation in the Chan Buddhist tradition), this does not mean that the “Rules of Purity” did not or do not exist
____
Working Titles: Improvised poems following titles picked near-randomly from the proverbial hat
Block: Ongoing notes toward a set of essays and poems emerging from having lived eight years on a block in Shanghai’s rapidly gentrifying former French Concession