MARLY YOUMANS is the author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent work includes a long poem, Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood), a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius), and a poetry collection, The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia)
Pentina for the Childhood Dream of Hong Zhu An
After seeing My Dream from 50 Years Ago, National Gallery, Singapore
In the deep of night, a little boy may dream
A sight that takes him fifty years to paint…
Primordial and strange, alive with fish,
A branched and schooling glimmerage of leaves
On a tree that joins the heavens to the earth.
Are the eternal things rooted in earth
And, gleaming, come to us as truth in dream?
His mother says a dream of schooling leaves
Means he’s a luck child, born to see and paint
Under a canopy of fortune’s fish.
Emblems of abundance, the household’s fish
Swim idly in the tank—not koi of earth
And tree, though bright, as if splotched with paint:
The boy recalls the shimmerings of dream,
The windblown gleams and flitter of the leaves.
Like a stirring angel, the tree of leaves
Is movement in his mind—his musings fish
For what a tree can mean, for what a dream
Descending in the night can say of earth,
And how a dream incarnates into paint.
Sometimes it takes half-centuries to paint
A childhood dream, to utter what the leaves
Are whispering to our Adamic earth,
To show the essence of a tree of fish
And find realities inside a dream.
What windfall wealth it was to dream and paint
Fish like spirit leaves, called up from earth…
A Tang Scholar-Poet in the Stables
After a “white painting” by Han Gan, 8th century
The emperor’s prime horse, Night-Shining White
Of the frolic of lifted heels, the eyelids of dawn,
And trembling, flaring nostrils: come to me,
And let me bridle all your larking ways
So I may leap upon your moonlight back.
I read your mystic riddle, sense that you
Are secretly celestial, that you
Are one of Shangdi’s pets, that you are sky’s
Hidden mystery, a blood-sweat dragon.
So yield to me, fire spirit, burnished snake,
Imperial and carp-scaled dragon who
Has danced and cycloned over Mongol plains,
Scribing wild and delicate inscriptions.
My pilfered, fragrance-crowned Hipparion,
My pinioned horse of lasting poetry,
My brother bard, we’ll fly this earth, and ink
Immortal letters onto clouds and air.
Idylls of Spring
1.
When wind, invited, tangles with the curtain,
When scilla, daffodil, and Lenten rose
Declare the winter’s drawn-out doom as certain,
I hear my name as sung by streams and meadows
And earth that wakes and wishes to be garden,
Yet linger for the baby curled in bedclothes,
This sleeping child with skin and hair like silk,
Breathing out a cloudy scent of breastmilk.
2.
Soaring over pomegranate trees,
The breeze gliding its fingers through our hair,
All flowers busied with the steps of bees,
My love and I went tumbling through the air
Like circus artists of the high trapeze,
Joined at the root, needle-naked, bare
To clouds and leaves—the semen on my thigh
Foretold this child while birds sang lullaby.
3.
Tug on the threads that long-dead mothers spun
For fairy tales—they’re not just snow and moonbeams
But realms where sins are thrust east of the sun
And west of moon. Dire sacrifice redeems
The tragedy of couples come undone
Or lovers magicked into marble dreams.
And if a child is captured by a witch,
She’ll flee the hut that seems half belle, half bitch.
4.
Puff of breath, warmth risen from the nest
Of crowning hair—a mortal fragrance raised
Like scent from a field that the dew has blessed…
I think of Bashō’s Matsushima praise,
His bay of scattered pine isles shawled in mist,
Some like a child directing toy-sized plays,
Some formed like babies at a mother’s breast,
Some shaped like children islanded in rest.
5.
And when our baby wakes, I make a song,
How I’m rose tree and she a bud-and-briar,
How I’m the arbor, she a scuppernong
Shy in leaves, how I’m the frisking fire
And she a spark, how I’m the lake at dawn
Where she’s a swan… and though we seldom tire
Of songs and laughing, all at once we cease
And stare, eyes locked, in momentary peace.
6.
What is there worth the doing in my time,
I wonder, if it is not making—to seed
With life and by this make our own eye-rhyme,
To feel the energies of lake and field
Stirring in me like an unborn child
That longs for birth and wants her summer’s yield;
To strive to make such moments live, unfurled
In words, and so be midwife in the world.
Blue Scene, Gold Box
After seeing Geumgwedo (1656) by Jo Sok,
National Museum of Korea
The lake and sky have mingled after rain,
Coupling with clouds and mirrorings of cloud,
The clouds not white but blue against a sky
That pales almost to white, and the blue shape
Of Sleeping Lion floats, a royal cloud
Islanded in mist of palest blue.
The sight is in me like a seed of pain,
So lovely that some part of me is bowed
In grief that all this wondrous scene will fly
Except in mind, where it may be dreamscape
To linger, mean, and grow, the way a crowd
Of leaves once hid a hanging chest from view—
Inside, the babe: a mythic foundation
That leads to kings by the seventh generation.
Four Winter Treasures at Otsego Lake
The eldest fir’s a mountain of needle-green;
Against its dark, as if against a screen,
A dragonish tangle of running script,
Beauty encrypted in branches, by snow tipped
And outlined, cursive burst of energy—
Arrested strangeness, and the apogee
Of all calligraphy, the wyvern lines
Explosive, frozen, wild: the winter’s signs
And sigils backed by the unshedding tree,
Tor that thrusts its verdant jubilee
From earth to sky beside the ice-chained lake
That holds what autumn tossed in its opaque
Jewelry-box—red leaves and maple keys
Jailed when frigid waters commenced to freeze.
And at Point Judith stands that mark of power,
Man-made, laborious Kingfisher Tower,
A beauty mark upon a cheek of ice,
Stonemasons’ height of earthly paradise,
The castellated spire they might have dreamed
To please the Sleeping Lion, ridge that seemed
Some eminence to rule the lake and land,
Blue palisades in lion’s shape—the grand
And playful cat who knows no hours or days,
No first or last, and cares not for this praise.
MARLY YOUMANS is the author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent work includes a long poem, Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood), a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius), and a poetry collection, The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia).
’Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work’ was the President’s Choice Award
and Runner-up, Formal Verse Contest 2024, The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch, Australia)
