And here, if I have the time to read a poem--
I think I'll do it.
OK.
This is a cycle of four or five shortish poems called
"To the Chinese Comrades."
I think it is up [INAUDIBLE], dedicated,
needless to say to Chairman Mao.
It's in sections.
This is not just a poem to the Chinese comrades as of now
but to my own, very personal conception
of the Chinese people and through history
and a peculiar feeling of relationship
to them and to their cousins, the American Indians.
"The armies of China and Russia stand
facing across a wide plain"--
this is a dream--
"Khrushchev on one side and Mao on the other.
Khrushchev calls out, pay me the money you owe me.
Mao laughs and laughs, long hair flops, his face round
and smooth.
The armies start marching-- they meet--
without clashing.
They march through each other, lines between lines.
All the time, Mao Tse-tung laughing.
He takes heaps of money.
He laughs, and he gives it to Khrushchev."
"Chairman Mao's belongings on the March."
This refers to the Long March of the 1930s.
"Chairman Mao's belongings on the March--
two cotton and wool mixture blankets, a sheet, two pants
and jacket, a sweater, a patched umbrella,
an enamel mug for a rice bowl, a gray briefcase with nine
pockets."
"Like Han-shan standing there, a rubbing off some cliff,
hair sticking out, smiling, maybe rolling a homegrown Yenan
cigarette.
Took a crack at politics.
The world is all one.
Crawling out that hillside cave dirt house.
Whatever happened to Wong--
quit Chinese school, slugged his dad, left the laundry,
went to sea, out the golden gate.
Did he make AB?
Black eggshell thin pots of Lung-shan,
maybe 3,000 years BC."
"You have killed.
I saw the Tibetans just down from the passes,
limping in high felt boots, sweating
in furs, flatland heat.
And from Almora, gazing at Trisul,
the new maps from Peking call it all China, clear down to here
and the Gangetic plain.
From Hong Kong New Territories on a pine rise,
see the other side--
stub fields, geese, ducks, and children.
Far-off cries.
Down the river, tiny men walk a plank-- maybe loading
little river boat.
Is that China, flat, brown, and wide?"
"The ancestors, what did they leave us.
K'ung fu-tze, a few old buildings remain,
and tons of soil gone.
Mountains turn desert, stone croppt flood, strippt hills,
the useless wandering river mouths, salt swamps,
silt on the floor of the sea.
Wind-borne glacial flour, ice age of Europe,
dust storms from Ordos to Finland, the loess of Yenan.
Glaciers 'shrink and vanish like summer clouds.'
Cross the snowy mountain we shall see Chairman Mao!"
"The year the Long March started, I was four.
How long has this gone on?
Rivers to wade, mountains to cross.
Charles Leong showed me how to hold my chopsticks
like the brush.
Upstairs, a Chinese restaurant catty-corner from the police.
Portland, Oregon, 1951.
Yakima Indian horseman, hair black as crows,
shovel-shaped incisors, epicanthic fold.
Misty cliffs and peaks of the Columbia.
Old loggers vanish in the rocks.
They wouldn't tote me rice and soy sauce cross the dam.
Snyder, you gettin' just like a damn Chinaman.
Gambling with the Wasco the Wishram
by the river under Hee Hee Butte.
And bought a hard round loaf of weird bread
from a bakery in a tent, in a camp of Tibetans at Bodh-Gaya,
where Guatama used to stay."