Author: George Life

George Life is a poet and translator currently living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Other sections from this series have appeared in N/A and Blackbox Manifold. He is also working on a two-volume selected translation of the late poems of Du Fu, early versions of which have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He blogs at periplumvia.blogspot.com.

from precarity

from precarity

02.20.13 – 03.01.13

hundred years and see bare land and suffer vertigo          so little seen

from prominence four hundred years and the same philosophy a few

places siphon sift too

                                   formal which is to say a kind of purity which is

to say          the plate is flawed the blue gourd brittle the shell

                                                                                                    cracked

that space that we’ve been talking about the curious remainder of the

future imagining ourselves already at the end beyond it even

                                                                                                    violence

and splendor somewhere west of Houston

03.02.13 – 03.11.13

                                                                    a few places precarity like

a new fire

                  will burn out the roots precarity the count on the calendar

has become confused the world in which we live the moon red in the

night and we miss it

                                   printed on a shirt what we are          free radicals

radicales libres eating Lay’s what we learned yesterday fails us today

what we learn today will fail us tomorrow

                                                                    why not be the snake that

goes on shedding its skin

03.12.13 – 03.21.13

                                           confident another          more beautiful one

lies beneath dark night bright moon Mairena vacas now grazing one

lot over brought

                           over when was it by the Spanish the present history

an anechoic chamber chance          occurrence so it is we are perfected

not by

           what we do but by what occurs to us the correspondences that

haunted Paracelsus the old excluded orders the female the proletariat

the foreign and as the wind moves as the wind

                                                                           moves as the          and

03.22.13 – 03.31.13

as our boat neared the shore we wept for joy the one beside me lifting

from his one good eye the coin placed there the signature

                                                                                             nowhere to

be seen the

                   paintings thrown into the river after the exhibition when

it reaches the sea what is the nature of art capitalized capital a sizable

property and on it a sizable house

                                                       no home ownable          what is the

nature of art one moves and writes over one’s contemporaries hoping

it might be otherwise

04.01.13 – 04.10.13

                                     guan guan cry the ospreys          on the island in

the river when it reaches the sea if you don’t learn the Book of Songs

you’ll have no way to speak

                                              in the context of chance what is it that is

permanent that doesn’t erode away breath forwardness

                                                                                         failure latent

in the creaking timbers umbilical          cord birth canal

                                                                                         as three coins

tossed six times talent a former weight a sum of money each oarsman

worth his          weight in gold don’t worry the old man said he’s only