Dream of the Divided Field Read online

  Advance praise for

  Dream of the Divided Field

  “Here is a book of the body, a book like no other: tender and eloquent, a singing across borders, across silences. What does it mean? It means that Dream of the Divided Field is a kind of book that you can’t just talk about, you simply have to quote whole poems. For instance, this one: ‘I woke up with so much love for you / It doesn’t matter where I am // I am making eggs // The sun is warming my just-shaved head / like your hand when sometimes / it rests there.’ This is because Yanyi is a terrific poet, one who’s written for us a book to read when we wake in the middle of the night and need a voice that is filled with longing, truth, and delight of being, despite all the painful odds.”

  —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic

  “Yanyi is a poet whose ambitions are soul-deep and startlingly poignant: to know the self as forever broken and to know language as the exquisite fiction of our wholeness. In his superb second book, Dream of the Divided Field, he recounts the dissolution of a relationship with heartbreaking clarity, revealing how the desire for reconstitution—of love, self, and world—is necessarily impossible. Yanyi knows intimately that as with the inconstancy of the lyric—queered, fragmentary, transcultural, transhistorical, pastoral, erotic, containing nothing and everything—thinking and feeling open us to the unknown and to others. Thus, the broken self is dispersed like the birds that ‘fly apart and grow their understanding.’ To love is to be inside and outside the self, to enter the world and let the world enter you, and how glorious it is to read a book that so bravely takes you everywhere.”

  —Jennifer Chang, author of Some Say the Lark

  “Tender, alternately stark and mysterious, these poems offer a calling, a summoning, a dwelling—while also attending to wounds, scars, landscape, and surges of joy. Here, amid glorious aubades and versions of Catullus and Sappho, are intimations of a failed love, and of other impasses: a field once shared, now divided, opens onto a field of inquiry. The way one is beheld and beholds is here tested and sung. These are poems as complex homing devices; they explore shelter, alienation, microshifts in relation, sudden gusts of love. Yanyi’s work is paradoxically earthily transcendental, concretely visionary. These poems move toward and through transformation. Moving between delicate lyric and poetic essai, Yanyi charts in his tremendous second book new paths for a poetry both embodied and metaphysical. Taking up one of the oldest aims of poetry, Dream of the Divided Field casts from its first pages a distinctive spell. It is as if the atmosphere of one’s mind acquired a new coloration, or found itself an instrument newly and differently tuned.”

  —Maureen N. McLane, author of Some Say and This Blue

  “What does it mean for each of us to be housed in a body? What is a body, but a thing to be entered and exited? In this collection of poems, Yanyi writes through leaving the body over and over—leaving old selves behind, old relationships, and old pains to birth into newness. Yanyi contends with what disappears and what stays, where we inhabit, where we can find safety, and where we can be found. A beautiful book that brings you in, that holds you close.”

  —Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us

  “Not only is the field divided in these poems, it is deeply layered through a kaleidoscopic double exposure. ‘The body reinventing itself became again its own mystic,’ Yanyi declares in this intimate and vulnerable book. There is a before and an after: the before revealed in the memory of love and the memory of a body; and the after, a metamorphosis both corporeal and spiritual. The poems are translucent, each informs the next and echoes back—concealment followed by joyous visibility, division followed by integration, and ultimately grief transformed into a luminous reconfiguration of the self.”

  —Samuel Ace, author of Meet Me There

  “A world of binaries (alive/dead, alone/together, day/night) has always been a frame—a limit to our imaginations. In order to understand oneself as separate (or separated), one must bring to mind (body, heart) the other to which one is no longer attached. In this way, there is togetherness in separation—the tether is reiterated (especially while under revision) to what was. And so how necessary, tender to experience the ever expanding multiplicity of Yanyi’s exquisite Dream of the Divided Field, where we are reminded that ‘the rain is different / each step from the moon.’ Even the architecture is alive with memory, which is to say possibility. In poems that are simultaneously spare and teeming, determined and soft—‘my scars enabling me to be doubly alive’—Yanyi does the patient, transcendent work of building a life larger than its loss. How grateful I am to this poet (a guide) who has shown me how to stay for a time in the irreparably gapped in order to become the building (the becoming) itself.”

  —TC Tolbert, co-editor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics

  “ ‘Can I come in? No, I / whisper with a voice I don’t have anymore,’ Yanyi writes in his new collection. That interdiction weakens as soon as it is uttered; it can’t hold back the intrusions of memory, of family and lovers who insist on coming in with their own ways of seeing, their judgment or prejudice. These are to the all-seeing speaker a curse, an illumination, an opportunity, a resignation—in unequal, unpredictable measure. Perhaps as an act of survival, the speaker seems to be in all places and times at once. The kaleidoscopic vision of the poems creates a disorienting logic that animates and transforms the ordinary world, investigating the limits and multiplicities of a self.”

  —Saskia Hamilton, editor of The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979

  Copyright © 2022 by Yanyi

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Some of the poems in this work have appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “Landscape with a Hundred Turns” as part of Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day; “Taking Care” in Bellevue Literary Review; “Migrants” in Cellpoems; “Eurydice at the Mouth” in Memorius: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction; “Catullus 85,” “Dream of the Divided Field,” and “Detail” in New England Review; “Aubade” and “Listening to Teresa Teng” in Reservoir Journal; “Flight” in The Shade Journal; “Home for the Holidays” in West Branch; “Aubade (Two of Cups)” in Already Felt: Poems in Revolt & Bounty (New York: Already Felt, 2021); “Family Tree” in Queenzenglish.mp3: Poetry | Philosophy | Performativity (New York: Roof Books, 2020).

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint four lines from “Ars Poetica” from New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 by Czesław Miłosz, copyright © 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 by Czesław Miłosz Royalites, Inc. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Yanyi (Poet), author.

  Title: Dream of the divided field: poems / by Yanyi.

  Description: New York: One World, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021016090 (print) | LCCN 2021016091 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593230992 (trade paperback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593231005 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

  Classification: LCC PS3625.A688 D74 2022 (print) | LCC PS3625.A688 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021016090

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021016091

  Ebook ISBN 9780593231005

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Design by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Michael Morris

  Cover illustration: Nicola Kloosterman

  ep_prh_6.0_139326550_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part I

  In the Museum

  Aubade (The Lake)

  Coming Over

  Taking Care

  Leaving the House

  Transitioned

  Landscape with a Hundred Turns

  Aubade (In Names)

  Part II

  Dream in Which I Try to Disappear in Front of My Aunt, or, Interrogation

  Getting Around (the Dream)

  Family Tree

  Listening to Teresa Teng

  Tenants

  Flight

  Blackout

  Part III

  Antiaubade

  Reconstruction

  Catullus 85

  The Friend

  The Cliff

  Eurydice at the Mouth

  Aubade (Two of Cups)

  Home for the Holidays

  Detail

  Spring of Cups

  Perennation

  Part IV

  Affirmation

  Balenciaga

  Faith

  Paradise, Lost

  Migrants

  Things We Didn’t Know

 
Home for the Holidays

  Making Double

  Part V

  Ambulance! Ambulance!

  四川话

  Lengthening, Rites

  Dream of the Divided Field

  The End of Another Year

  Deconstruction

  I Had a Vision of a Hill

  Garden Sketch

  Aubade

  Translation

  Once

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  By Yanyi

  About the Author

  The purpose of poetry is to remind us

  how difficult it is to remain just one person,

  for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

  and invisible guests come in and out at will.

  —Czesław Miłosz

  I

  In the Museum

  The monument lives inside the body.

  The monument lives outside. Two

  bodies may be monuments, side by side,

  enacting what is already a memory.

  Move through the halls—you are styled with wings—

  and pass on, constantly, while you are living.

  There are no walls between the living and the dead:

  only what you remember now and what you remember ahead.

  Aubade (The Lake)

  Buried dawn broke

  onto slight leaves. And geese

  between a cold and hot sky:

  a mountain and a sunrise.

  It is five months since we separated.

  I am not so different from the long hare

  stretched by her shadow,

  her spirit hanging.

  What I would give for the dead

  beat of mud shaped and now

  eaten in. Coyotes rousing

  in fast laps of the moon.

  Take me to the lake and do no evil.

  Lead me by the hair to who I love.

  Coming Over

  What was left of our relationship

  neatly folded on the couch.

  And the bathroom noticed

  what else was missing. You

  came into the bathroom, taking

  out your razor, your toothbrush. Leaving

  my toothbrush. Replacing every thing

  next to its double, as though

  I had needlessly doubled. I walked

  out from my bathroom and you walked

  into my bathroom. The little soap

  and the razor. The duplicates in the bags

  not wanting to owe me anything:

  not wanting to have appeared.

  It is like that. I give my house and you take

  how you live in it. Not backwards or forwards,

  but the past and the present

  overcoming one another.

  Taking Care

  I take off my binder before a massage

  and dream of top surgery: not having to wait

  for the masseur to ask about————, my abnormal

  desire to be inside this body, once, easily

  identified and therefore easy to take care of.

  I am not easy to take care of. I should just

  take care of myself: ask a doctor to remove

  the parts that are reprehensible. Like when

  they break the nose in order

  to construct a better one,

  I bring a picture to the hairdresser. I bring

  a picture to the mirror where I cut my skin

  with my eyes.

  As a man, I’ve learned something of nationhood:

  the shape of a brook now straddled by a dam,

  or choked by it.

  Leaving the House

  When I say I’m in love with you,

  that means I’m not alone inside of it.

  Together we talk to people

  we love, separately, in one voice.

  When my voice fills in love with you.

  When I sing on the outside.

  Transitioned

  In the corner, the bodega

  doesn’t quite approach me.

  It hides its face in its awning.

  The yellow lights awake

  in the taco place and, forever romantic,

  on the mayo and slaw strewn on tilapia.

  Eating, with new reasons, are new mouths.

  The window views the third floor, which was once

  my bedroom. Immersed in the view was itself.

  An arch in the bathroom still remembers

  my chest. How there was more

  that’s now lessened.

  The floors had just been mopped.

  Those five years taken off.

  Landscape with a Hundred Turns

  When you turned into a hundred rooms,

  I returned each month as a door

  that opened only one.

  When you turned into a hundred rooms

  the wind flung through

  each of them wailing

  and left a hundred songs

  in hopes you would return for it

  and me and

  once, finding a doe locked up,

  the trees blued up

  the mountain pass, I understood

  you had transformed into your multiple,

  as the rain is different

  each step from the moon. Sleeping

  in a hundred rooms, a hundred dreams

  of you appear—though by day

  your voice has frozen into standing stones.

  When you turned into a hundred rooms,

  I met with a mirror in each eye

  your growing absence.

  When I moved, the shadows without you

  followed me. In the hundred rooms,

  I cannot pick one,

  for each combines into the other

  where I piece-by-piece the shadows

  you have ceased

  to remember. As the rain

  is different each day of the year,

  when I turned for you

  and hoped you’d return to me,

  was it I who left

  and you who remained the same?

  For when you changed,

  I changed

  the furniture in the rooms.

  A hundred birds flew over a hundred fields.

  A mountain flowed into a hundred rivers

  then ended.

  In a hundred rooms,

  I turned and turned,

  hoping to return to you.

  O, the chrysanthemums grew

  in the hundred rooms!

  Far in the past and far in the future

  were those numinous and echoing stars.

  Aubade (In Names)

  Bright One and Dear One

  My Blue After Storms

  My Ocean of Long Hums

  My Wandering Door

  My This One

  My Gone One

  My Lingering For

  My Light One

  My Long One

  My Morning of More