Posted on by Marly Youmans

Five poems by Marly Youmans

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.