Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume One
November- December 2025
Ode to Meaninglessness, poems by Ma Yongbo.
Ode to Meaninglessness
The cataract growing in the dead horse’s eye, children chase
their own screams that hover between deep-sea creatures and plants,
running back and forth. This is the land you lived in,
the alley where golden twilight slowly retreats,
only the mother of fear can save you,
while the mother of truth’s call to come home lingers unheard.
How to return to simplicity: the simplicity of flame,
the layered simplicity of a rose—not love,
not rungs of esoteric knowledge,
not the cosmic wheel of sacrifice,
but merely a flower being itself.
A human too, just human—not a vessel, not a function,
only a simple body and simple joy,
ah, to return to that meaningless wilderness,
that wilderness which is paradise.
Necessary abstractions, words in masquerade
pilgrimages through endless vegetarian buffets
from the shed elytra of countless past lives,
you come here to prove
this place does not exist, you do not exist,
if you find land turned to fish,
a school of memories with transparent brains—
what will you do with them?
Yet here remain flickering surfaces,
smooth, impenetrable, drawn-out pranks,
like mirrors that both reveal and block,
a point spinning infinitely back into itself—
dust forever mimicking the cold reverse.
You must rise from the depths to the surface; you must forget
the silent language of forking flames,
green blood, hay, and the lightning of pitchforks.
Empty Mountain
The emptiness of this empty mountain hinges on your loneliness
on those who once lived here before you,
on which slope of the valley the white breath of spring ascends,
which slope the golden exhalation of autumn descends,
more depends on where you observe the qi in this moment
even the time it takes for a moss-cloaked stone
to plunge to the valley’s bottom.
Then time’s echo will split the valley wide,
revealing mountains behind or beyond this mountain:
the slow transparency of raindrops falling before or after this mountain,
the heavy slowness of a great bird rising from a broad and smooth water surface,
and your gaze lifting from depth to height.
As for the mist of dawn and dusk, the incense curling over your incense table,
as for the half-painted screen, a letter that only has the beginning part,
the flatlands beyond the mountains, crisscrossing paths, and distant winds—
all can temporarily give way to a mood of missing a friend , yet not longing to meet.
Thoughts on Portrait of John Ashbery
You split the darkness open from its very core
you split the fragmented crimson darkness—
those are red window panes you’ve painted black with words,
or a door on the verge of falling away,
two geometric fruits plucked too soon.
You turn to the right, gaze fixed in astonishment,
the ice in your mouth nearly slips away,
what did you see? or what saw you?
the salt flats of your forehead glow with a pale, blank light.
What feeble caution, yet how weightless—
your hand, a small single-pole double-throw switch,
do you mean to turn the universe on, or shut it off?
let the electrified darkness shriek in curls,
let yourself become a bloodless piece of chalk.
Come out, old brother, from your flattened utopia,
come to the loneliness of my thirty-year-old birches
I’m stuck between two young, rounded bodies,
you never became my father either,
I hesitate like you, stare to the right like you,
as lost as you—wondering what I saw,
or what saw me.
Maybe we could gather white plants together,
arrange them before a wiped-clean blackboard,
until it all ends,
and trust again the certainty of the weather.
© Ma Yongbo
Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese. He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 9 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell,Williams, Ashbery. His translation of Moby Dick has sold over 600,000 copies. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.