I sent the following piece as a replacement (that for some reason was never posted) for a poem that was included in my Top Five love poems feature on the Poetry Foundation website last Valentine’s Day. My translation of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XX could not be published online because of a copyright snag. I’m happy to present the replacement love poem here, written by Kimiko Hahn:
Chuang Tzu’s Mistress Sleeps in a Draft
She dreams she leans over the brown dust
and lifts a brown leaf that is a moth,
holds it inside her mouth
to revive the flutter from a frost
now covering the still-live glass,
the fallen pears half eaten by deer,
and her shoulders exposed from the comforter
her lover always drags to his side of the mattress.
Or was it a monarch? she mutters.
With a word like Mistress in the title, all other m-words stand out. In this case: moth, mouth, mattress, monarch and mutters, revealing a blueprint of transgression, but also of vulnerability. And that second-guessing at the end always gets me—was it a monarch or a moth? a creature of daylight or a castaway of night?—as if demanding that I reorient my prejudices and reposition my view of “the other woman.” This poem is about the complexity of desire, the simultaneous need for carnal pleasure and for absolution.
Additionally, the poem is a clever nod toward one of the most well-known Buddhist metaphors of Chuang Tzu, the influential Chinese philosopher of the 4th century B.C. In his Taoist text, he wrote about the transformation of things by introducing the story of the butterfly dream in which, upon waking up, he is uncertain whether he is the man who had a dream he was a butterfly, or whether he is a butterfly dreaming he is a man. His mistress, it seems, has taken note.
Though Kimiko Hahn’s most recent book The Narrow Road to the Interior was released last year (and I highly recommend it for a close study of the zuihitsu), the poems of Mosquito & Ant regale and charm me. They are as beautiful as they are naughty.
(From Mosquito & Ant, Kimiko Hahn, W.W. Norton, 1999. Used with the permission of the author.)
A lot of nice slant rhymes in that poem too–”moth” almost becomes “mouth” through a slight vowel shift. “Matress” slant rhymes with “glass” but also rearranges its sounds to become “mutters”. Thanks for sharing this. I’ll look out for Hahn’s work.
PS–it also occurs to me that “draft” is something of a pun, with the revision at the end from “moth” to “monarch.”
Rigoberto,
Thanks for the nudge about including this gem of a poem in your love-poem list. For our readers, here’s a link to it.
Emily
Although familiar with her work, I hadn’t read this peice by KH. Your careful explication was a nice addition. Thanks for sharing.
-GK