The Tea-Pet Toad

by Brett Rutherford

The carved red toad,
mouth open just enough
to hold a single dime,
is a harbinger of wealth,
slow-earned, a tenth
of a dollar doled
out a thousand
thousand times,

the kind of fortune
earned only
by making, by hand,
ten thousand dumplings.

The poor batrachian,
I did not notice
until yesterday,
has only two legs,
a bit of tail
for a tripod
solidity. What of
his other legs?

For lack of dimes
did he sell them off
to a street vendor
whose frog-leg dainties
please the crowd?

That string of coins
slung over his shoulder
implies he should not be
that desperate.

His gem eyes glitter
a greedy ruby and say,
“No need for legs.
I need not leap at all.
Coins come to me,
and pale tea pours
from the heavens
to pool around me.”

Serene as Buddha,
wrinkled as sage,
squat on his I Ching
pedestal, King Toad
rules the tea table.

Figures sur un Vase du Règne de Kangxi

LES ANCIENS BUVANT

by Brett Rutherford

Si le monde se terminait,
ils ne le sauraient pas.

Haut sur le versant
d’une montagne sacrée,
six érudits mortels
se réunissent
dans le jardin d’un manoir.

Maître Liu a tout arrangé
pour atténuer la chaleur
du mois d’août.

Un paravent dissimule
l’éblouissement du soleil
et ombrage la table,
là où quatre amis
dégustent du vin froid,
que l’hôte verse
d’un drapeau antique.

     Ma main fait tourner le vase
          décoré de figures bleues.

Gao, le haut fonctionnaire exilé,
arrive avec un livre interdit
qu’il tient près de son cœur.

Son neveu,
jeune et beau,
est trop habillé.
Il préfère faire une sieste
dans un vallon ombragé,
sans chapeau,
le col ouvert.

Un petit garçon,
un autre participant,
semble submergé
par la chaleur et l’ennui.

Celui-ci préfère jouer
avec son arc
et ses flèches,
ou regarder courir
les chevaux sauvages,

mais ici, le rythme lent
des vieillards rappelant
leurs poèmes,
et feuilletant les pages
pour trouver un dicton
confucéen —
elle doit suffire.
L’honneur c’est
d’être avec les sages.

     Ma main fait tourner le vase
          décoré de figures bleues.

Un serviteur se penche
pour ajouter des charbons
à un brasero enflammé.
L’eau est ici
pour les théières brunes
d’argile yi xing.

Les murets
zigzaguent le bord
du domaine de Liu.
Des arbres surplombent
l’écran peint.
Leurs branches
sont identiques
à ce que l’artiste
y a peint.

Quelle audace
de placer une forêt peinte
devant une vraie!

     Ma main fait tourner le vase
          décoré de figures bleues.

Dans le brouillard
de la montagne,
les sommets lointains,
et même le bord
d’un précipice voisin,
se perdent
dans la blancheur,
pâle comme de la porcelaine.

Tout est au premier plan,
et une main tendue
pourrait toucher la glaçure froide,
traçant la courbe
des limites de l’existence.

Figés une fois
et figés pour toujours,
les vieillards débattent
des mérites
des styles poétiques.

Ils délibèrent
sur la question de savoir
si les objets sont permanents
ou s’ils s’effacent
vers le néant.

Vin frais,
thé chaud,
la montée et la chute des tons
d’une chanson mémorable;

étouffé,
le faible rugissement
des eaux qui tombent

calligraphie
appelée de rien
pour tomber
sur une page blanche.

     Ma main fait tourner le vase
          décoré de figures bleues.

La journée est trop chaude
pour toute autre diversion.
Le monde se terminerait
si les yeux cherchaient
profondément
dans la brume plus dense.

Il y a un éblouissement jaune,
moucheté de moucherons.
Deux papillons y planent.
Ils sont en apesanteur,
immobiles
et terrifiés.

Quelle est cette tache
sur la blancheur pure:
     le soleil brûlant
          qui a envie de se montrer?
     une ville lointaine
          en feu, envahie?
     le cri
          qui explose
          d’un atome fendu?

Gao, apportez-moi le livre!
Soyez rapide,
mon amie.
Trouvez la bonne page,
     les mots à lire,
     les noms
          des dieux —
si les dieux existent —
que nous devons invoquer.

Ici,
dans la clarté du thé,
mille ans de sagesse
adhèrent.

Si longues sont les après-midis,
si courtes sont les nuits
d’août,
rongées par les insectes.

Ici,
ils sont tous en sécurité:
érudits, neveu,
garçon et serviteur.

     Ma main fait tourner le vase
          décoré de figures bleues.

Les Anciens buvant.
Ils n’ont pas à craindre
la fin du monde.

 

[Un vase peint à la main en bleu et blanc représente des érudits dans un Jardin. Derrière quatre érudits assis, un paravent peint les protège du soleil et du vent. Les arbres peints à l’écran sont les mêmes que ceux qui les entourent. Tout est au premier plan – aucun paysage lointain n’est visible, comme si la scène était entourée de brouillard. Sous la glaçure du vase, un grand espace ouvert a une légère fonte jaune, et le peintre de vase a dessiné de petites taches de poussière autour du bord de la lueur mystérieuse, et a placé deux papillons qui y planent. Ce qui ressemble à un défaut de couleur de l’argile semble intentionnel, et on nous demande d’expliquer sa cause, et pourquoi les savants semblent suspendus au premier plan.]

Figures On A Kangxi Vase

by Brett Rutherford 

The world might end
and they would not know it.
High on the slope
of a sacred mountain,
six mortal scholars gather
in a mansion garden.

Master Liu
has arranged everything
to mitigate
the heat of August.
A folding screen
conceals sun’s glare
and shades the table
where four enjoy
cold wine
from an antique flagon.

Hand turns around
blue-figured vase.
Gao, the exiled
high official, arrives
with a banned book
close to his heart.

His nephew, young
and handsome, feels
overdressed, and would
prefer a shady glen
to nap in, hatless
with collar undone.

A small boy, restless,
another bored
participant,
would rather be at
his bow and arrow,
or watching the play
of wild horses, but here
the slow pace of old men
calling to mind a poem,
leafing the pages to find
a Confucian dictum,
must suffice.
Honor it is
to be with the wise.

Hand turns around
blue-figured vase.
Crouching, a servant
adds coals to fire
beneath the brazier
meant to refresh
brown yi xing teapots.

Low walls zig-zag
the edge of Liu’s estate.
Trees overhang
the painted screen,
branches identical
to what the artist
painted there.
How daring to place
a painted forest
before a real one!

Hand turns around
blue-figured vase.
In mountain fog
the distant peaks,
even the edge
of a nearby precipice
are lost in white
as pale as porcelain.

All is foreground
and an extended hand
might touch cold glaze,
tracing the curve
of the limits of existence.

Frozen this once
and forever, the old men
debate the merits
of poetic styles,
deliberate
on whether things
are permanent
or fade to nothing.

Cool wine, warm tea,
the rise and fall
of a remembered song;
muffled, the dim roar
of falling waters;
calligraphy called up
from nothing to drop
upon a blank page.

Hand turns around
blue-figured vase.
A day too hot
for any other purpose.
The world might end
if eyes sought deep
into the denser mist,
a yellow glare,
gnat-flecked, in which
two butterflies hover,
weightless, immobile,
and terrified.

What is this blotch
upon pure whiteness?
The burning sun
craving to show itself?
A distant city
ablaze, invaded?
The exploding scream
of a split atom?

Gao, the book!
Be quick, my friend!
Find the right page,
the words to read,
the names of gods,
if gods there are,
we need invoke.

Here in the clarity
made plain by tea,
a thousand years
of wisdom adheres.
So long, the afternoons,
so short the nights
of bug-bite August.

Here they are safe,
scholars, nephew,
boy, and servant.
Hand turns around
blue-figured vase.
They need not fear
the world might end.

[A hand-painted blue-and-white vase depicts scholars in a garden. Behind four seated scholars, a painted, folding screen protects them from sun and wind. The trees painted on the screen are the same as those around them. All is foreground – no distant landscape is visible, as though the scene were surrounded by fog. Under the vase’s glaze, a large open area has a slight yellow cast, and the vase painter has drawn little dust-flecks around the edge of the mysterious glow, and placed two butterflies hovering there. What looks like a defect in the color of the clay seems purposeful, and we are asked to explain its cause, and why the scholars seem suspended in the foreground.]

 

 

Two Scholars Atop A Cliff

by Brett Rutherford

Fu Bao Shi paints them:
two scholar friends
who seldom agree
on weighty matters,
friends now
and forever regardless.

One faces the painter.
Perhaps he is glad
to be seen there
facing another cliff
we can only imagine.

The other looks off
into the spiky peaks
whose forested slopes
play hide and seek
in perpetual fog.

Posed at right angles,
neither scholar sees
the same reality;
neither can know
how Fu sees them
seeing. Fu cannot see
what either scholar
perceives.

 
Black ink,
brown washes.
One nature,
many mountains.
Each man alone
in a universe
of seeing.

Pity the Dragon

 

by Brett Rutherford

PITY THE DRAGON

Surveying my vases,
teapots and paintings,
I count no less
than thirty dragons
leaping from peak
into a sea of clouds,
ever in chase
of that flaming pearl
it is never allowed
to swallow, apart
from its kind around
the curve of vase,

contending with phoenixes,
cloud clots, and even
perversely huge flowers,
it is never permitted
to meet one of its kind,
to caress, converse,
make love. One wonders

if new dragons are ever made
at all. Seldom entirely
free, one claw behind
a tuft of smoke, the edge
of a clifftop, the line
of a rooftop — even
the artist constrains it
with such device
in fear of its free flight,
its all-consuming
flame. How free
is free if one is ever
alone and above
the loved world?

 

The Orphaned Vase

by Brett Rutherford

Two decades or more I have studied it:
that double-dragon-handled vase
from my New York hauntings.
Bought from a Chinese store
about to shut down forever,
its unsold vases stacked,
dust-covered orphans
that had never found a home.

Today I regard it with new eyes
and undertake to learn its origins,
and what the wriggling floral shapes
and tangled leaves can tell me.

Amid the leaves are Treasures:
a thick square book in a silken cord,
a checker board awaiting two players,
two rice-paper scrolls tied up
blank for calligraphy to come,
and two rhinoceros horns
predicting happiness
for the vase’s owner.

It was intended, no doubt,
to be a young scholar’s first vase,
its carmine glaze the blush
of a young man’s ardor,
its unknown, ardent flowers
all petals open to the sun.

It is all good omens, but no one came
to the old shop on Mott Street
to carry it off; no scholar sipped
his oolong tea and wrote poems
in the cheer of its good karma.

Close scrutiny reveals
some hint of the reasons why:
one of the dragon handles
is missing the monster’s snout.
Some accident — a fall, a ricochet
of a bandit’s bullet, broke off
this beast’s ability
to snort a blowtorch back
at a would-be attacker.

One also sees
the whole vase is a-tilt.
It leans some five degrees
off vertical, so doomed to sit
like someone whose leg
is shorter than the other,
a tipsy vase just ready
to take a tumble.

It is a century old, I guess.
It is lonely for its maker,
for the fine-haired brush
that painted it, for the wheel
on which it was cast lopsided.

It comes from a kiln
that exists no more. One day,
a Japanese bomber took sight
at the Wude Sheng factory
and all was blown
to smithereens.

Thou, sad vase,
thou, snoutless dragon,
thou, limping, tilted vessel,
orphan of war and history.

ON A CHINESE FAN BY DONG GAO

ON A CHINESE FAN BY DONG GAO[1]

Hand-painted, a universe of greens and grays
emerging from a background mist
on the sewn strips of a Chinese fan:

the scholar, a man of some wealth
and even greater erudition, has brought
(o wonder of labor and engineering)
a good half dozen scholar’s stones,

each high as a house wall, soft stone
eroded to honeycomb by a millennium
of patient rain and hollowing,
forming three sides around his table;

at ease with his calligraphy, the brazier
bright and burning with water a-boil,
the servant refilling the yi xing[2] pot
as fast as he drinks down
the finest of water-nymph teas;

the reedy crooning of an er-hu[3]
fiddle at his right; off to the rear
a pi-pa[4] lute player awaiting
her turn to please him, the rocks
a perfect amphitheater;

birds hovering, pruned trunks
of trees on one side bending
the trunk in an artful curve
(how long it took to tease
one cherry in and among
the hollows of the lingbi stone!).[5]

No solitary scholar this,
alone in a gazebo perched
on some cliff above the cloud-line:

he has a secondary grove,
o’erhung with pine and willow
beneath whose shade
a table is spread with all his poetry,
where two friends tune the zheng,[6]

to whose melancholy fingerings
(glissando and tremolo)
they’ll echo back his lines to him,

even while serving girls unwrap
the afternoon repast of tofu,
pickles piquant with rice vinegar
and red chilis, and red-bean cake.

Other friends ambulate
amid the upthrust rocks
and clinging tree-roots,
catching the drift but not
the meaning of his poems
as wind and waterfall
hum through the sighing pines.

It is a place so beneficent
that in it poems are superfluous —

well, almost.

CLICK OVER RED TITLE AT TOP OF THIS POEM TO SEE THE WORK OF ART (AT LEAST AS LONG AS IT STAYS LIVE ON CHRISTIES' WEBSITE.)

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[1] Dong Gao (1740-1818). The Chinese fan described here was sold at Christie’s in 2010.

[2] Yi xing, a red-purple clay used for making scholar’s teapots and other ornamental ceramics.

[3] Er-hu, the two-stringed Chinese fiddle.

[4] Pi-pa, the Chinese lute

[5] Lingbi, name of the hollowed, perforated stone from Anhui province favored for scholar’s stones.

[6] Zheng, the Chinese zither.