Fire-work

Light Passage – Autumn

Cai Guo-Qiang, 2007

1. 灾

Radical for house. Radical for fire.    After a last practiced  Stroke the calligrapher

Into the metal pan passes    This last scrap of paper.  Quiet the fall of the paraffin

Light on the library wall,    The calligrapher’s library  Burns itself down: every scroll

Unscrolls its sallow to the yellow flame,    The heat unstitches  Each spine to a spill of pages,

All the loose slips blister into black    Lace, until that last  Paper smokes, sizzles its wet ink,

And collapses. The metrical boottaps    Of the state  Pass by in the dark street.

Hush here this beautiful catastrophe,    In the basin’s brass  A bouquet of ash.

2. 滅口

Radical for water, radical for talk.    The ardent  Lexicons of the revolution

Blaze on beyond the monastery gate,    But abandoned, remote,  Its corridors and dormitories

Murmur the calligrapher’s strange exile.    He keeps the lamps  Unlit. He keeps himself quiet,

Ghosting the ruined rooms, perusing    The bare bookshelves  While on his soundless lips move

Poems no longer bound there. Out on the grounds    After every rain  The calligrapher wanders,

With a stick extinguishing each word,    Stroke by beloved  Stroke, into the puddles.

3. 花火

At a quick strike on the steel-scratch, the match    Flares, the fuse catches  And crawls in a slow sparkle

To the powderbox propped at the canvas.    The calligrapher’s son  Knows his explosives—the blow-

Force of saltpeter, the scatter patterns,    The weights and burn-rates  Of his elements and their velocities,

The hues of their various char against cloth:    Blueburning copper,  Salt red. What is charactered there

In the linen weave is the mind burning    The thing it loves best  To sear its afterimage against

Its forgetting. This is his inheritance,    This the farewell letter  His father never left: radical

For fire and flower together.