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Argument from Silence

 

Yongkang Lu 1

Yongkang Lu 2

Yongkang Lu, Shanghai’s former French Concession, July 19, 2013

Yongkang Night (2) 

Yongkang Night

Banker Wins”

 

We have nothing in that
fanciful or speculative relation

The gap between our ears — the air
that vibrates with these words

Vocal cords to ear drums, the nerve
bundles, signal-to-noise, our

Ratio, the incentive to know
one another’s minds

Drop predictable experience
here, abandon all hope

Of anything but change
O — O — the poetic O of apostrophe

Thinking one could know,
understand? Let us try again: I

Was six when I first read, I think,
of the firebombing of Dresden

At seven  I felt a rush 
at the sight of a blonde 

Pinup below the cockpit
desert-pink camouflaged B‑25

*

back to Yongkang Lu, where and old skinny Shanghainese man in a wife-beater walks by the Old Bubbles Café in cheap sky-blue plastic sandals, foot catching in a plastic bag, the thin gray kind that wrap big eight-liter water bottles, he kicks it off his foot and shuffles on in the bright August heat as inside the café at the next table a chunky graying goateed Englishman and two heavy young women — Belgian? — talk marketing, the blonde woman saying, “we weren’t too happy with the photographer we used at the gala ball — I gave him a clear briefing to get everything we have branded on the tables and picturepicturepicture! but then later we had to Photoshop everything in anyway…” as a fireplug of a middle-aged Shanghainese woman – old enough to have been a Red Guard, perhaps – trundles past in a t‑shirt brightly declaring: LIFE IS REPEATED

*

though neither Shi Daoyuan’s early eleventh-century The Transmission of the Lamp nor any Song-era Pure Land Buddhist documents mention Changlu Zongze’s “Rules of Purity” code (the earliest known guide to seated meditation in the Chan Buddhist tradition), this does not mean that the “Rules of Purity” did not or do not exist

 

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b52 amoy

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Working Titles: Improvised poems following titles picked near-randomly from the proverbial hat 

Block: Ongoing notes toward a set of essays and poems emerging from having lived eight years on a block in Shanghai’s rapidly gentrifying former French Concession