This is-- I have a passion for Peking opera.
And this is a poem called "Duration of Water,"
and it's written after--
a princess Yang Kuei-Fei who was married to the prince
but the emperor fell in love with her and it--
all the complications, she finally
hung herself with a white scarf.
"Duration of Water."
"So that I make you a microcosm or symbolic center
of the public like a theater with hundreds
of painted scenes combining and recombining
in order to exaggerate situations of joy or pain
on stage.
Instead of five short songs about you,
accompanying dancers who seem to float on their backs
in still water, as the empyrean.
They would be the water motor.
Three stones protrude from the water,
and three instruments combine and repeat a simple scale,
but some passions only resolve with fire and weather
catastrophes.
The orchestra nevertheless clears
like foliage for Yang Kuei-Fei's sigh
when she hears the emperor wants her.
There is a red line on the boards I can follow
in the thick smoke or mist.
The shoulders of the man changed scale
as if I had been manipulating the field inside a small box
to see how light can transform me into foliage
as a sexual punishment.
The music can take on the cold or heat
of the air like blue chameleons on the limbs of the tree
as is if you could look through the leaves into the empyrean.
I can turn back my sleeve with a multiplicity
of detail of the battleground.
The colors combine into legible hues at a distance.
There is a craft at work to reconcile emotion
in a purely speculative ambience tracking
the last area like a duration of water, which
is a piece of white silk."