2010 Neustadt Laureate Duo Duo (多多)
Promise
Duo Duo
translated from Chinese by Mai Mang
I love, I love my shadow
Being a parrot, I love eating
What it loves eating, I love giving you what I don’t have
I love asking: Do you still love me?
I love your ear, and it loves listening: I love adventures
I love this enamored house inviting us to lie down and
make its roof
I love lying on my side, casting a shadow for a straight line
Leaving a string of small villages for a voluptuous body
I want that birthmark closest to your lips
To know, this is my promise
I love the intelligence in my dreams being an ambitious groom
I love eating raw meat, gazing straight at hell
But more I love secretly playing the violin in your arms
I love turning off the lights early, waiting
For your body to illuminate this room once again
I love when I sleep, my pillow covered in plums
Waking up, the plums all have returned to their
branches
I love all night long the waves attracting the front deck
of the ship
I love shouting: You will come back
I love torturing the harbor, torturing words, in this way
I love controlling myself in front of the desk
I love thrusting my hands into the sea
I love my five fingers stretching open at the same time
Holding tightly the edges of a wheat field
I love my five fingers still being your five boyfriends
I love memory being a life, less
But still more than what has been left out when a
woman
Walks toward me, as if thirty years ago
In the sunset, on the street, that girl carrying her violin
case
Still smiling at me for no reason
I love even more that we are still a pair of torpedoes
Waiting for someone to launch us again
I love rejoining you in the depths of the sea, you
Are mine, only mine, I
Still love speaking like this, like this, singing of my
promise –
2008
from WLT and Qinghai Lake Poetry Festival Special Issue 2011
Read more poems by Duo Duo in WLT
