michael pollak

chinese writing

In my first week of studying Chinese writing,
I placed two horses beside two tigers
and the word careless formed.
With just five brushstrokes, I made an eye,
yet it took twelve for happiness,
eleven for success and fourteen for long life,
which I brushed on rice paper,
trying to master all the hooks and angles
of those difficult strokes. But then, writing English again,
for the first time since third grade I started to count
how many barely discernible movements my fingers make
guiding my favorite pen into broken cursive loops and crannies,
swirls and down strokes, up strokes, cross strokes
entering and leaving every sentence,
the anguished commas and dashes, the little ellipses
come out of their hiding places as if they were
pinpricks of honey at the end of clover spikes,
into this fine moving world.
And with such minute pleasures I was content
at the end of the day, which the Chinese might paint as rì-yuè,
or time passing in falling tones,
almost as beautiful as míng baí, to understand
those wonderful tiny crate characters,
that miniature broken ladder character,
the rising tones of sun, moon, clear-white, in two squares of sky.

Dick Allen