Her weird margins bend tense and space just as powerfully in “Night Falls.” En face bilingual translation collapses into a single page; what are we supposed to make of the diminished distance between Chinese and English? Is it a break within a single centered poem or between two discrete poems? As the languages switch places or one disappears or takes over, it’s hard to know what’s origin and what’s translation, what’s commentary and what’s displacement (“I am sorry I could not keep you in my mind”). All of this to say: Lynn Xu is expert at multiplying sites of resonance and ambiguity, of conjoining or confusing epochs and zones, braiding her lines into a “wreath / In which time, unleaving, did / Row back, backward its small current.” It did and it does.

—Ben Lerner

Night Falls
Click here to download a PDF (contains Chinese characters).

For John Berryman
Sing warrior songs rain songs sing The Times sing light
Soil stone shade sing rock
Songs
Dream
Songs sing
Isolde
In Tahiti Faust
In Haiti lions dolphins manatees sing
I saw
My friend sing
In the
Abyss his
Singing did not carry me but followed joint-
By-joint see-
Sawing in the breeze and there I saw him fall
Down he went
Darkness does not come to sing. Tethered like a comma to
The air broods
On Henry’s shy and spindly nerve. To meet a flower
And suffer when it fails to bloom—oh
Jealous worm,
Does terror not also
Decorate?

Mon frère,
Mon frère, ballad
Of the air.
Who could see you and forget
The blue eye quivering
From its root?
Savage
Smile upon these words and things, and sing
For god’s sake
Savage, sing. A velvet coif of

Blond
Falls over the bridge
Of your nose. Pillars of transparent
Fire the poet lay underneath,
Rehearsing to make a grade
At age twenty-eight. The prudential balm
That summer brings
Lacerations in the brain. A shrapnel of the dark
Smears in night’s stride, gleams the
Eye shakes
From its grave, gradual, self-
Loathing dark
Crumples in our clothes. Mon frère, mon frère, ballad
Of the air.
For Paul Celan
Asylum is a dead man’s word, brother
It is embarrassing to die. To see
The sky below as an abyss and hear
Its horny thrush of frost thread shadows on the sea;
The sky so blue upon the water sings,
Its grave is green, and through me runs the grass.
But blindness does not furnish, blindness brings
Night down to the blended notes that children in their class-
Rooms sing, brother, sunset after sunset,
Do we not walk through crocuses in bloom?
The dead do walk upon their heads, and yet
The headless one emits a bright perfume.
God’s rainbow do we sing, and singing did undress
The serpents that we name, brother, we are blessed.
For Miguel Hernández
Bread on the inside, bread we cannot eat
Blind to crocodiles, blind to wind
Bread soil bread shade bread sun
And there are leaves, many leaves, branches
That telescope into the brain, in my country, we are uneasy
Because of the light that bread emits
Because in your country, it seems, darkness is cut away

For Paul Celan
Asylum is a dead man’s word, brother
It is embarrassing to die. To see
The sky below as an abyss and hear
Its horny thrush of frost thread shadows on the sea;
The sky so blue upon the water sings,
Its grave is green, and through me runs the grass.
But blindness does not furnish, blindness brings
Night down to the blended notes that children in their class-
Rooms sing, brother, sunset after sunset,
Do we not walk through crocuses in bloom?
The dead do walk upon their heads, and yet
The headless one emits a bright perfume.
God’s rainbow do we sing, and singing did undress
The serpents that we name, brother, we are blessed.

For Miguel Hernández
Bread on the inside, bread we cannot eat
Blind to crocodiles, blind to wind
Bread soil bread shade bread sun
And there are leaves, many leaves, branches
That telescope into the brain, in my country, we are uneasy
Because of the light that bread emits
Because in your country, it seems, darkness is cut away

For Gerard Manley Hopkins
Whose thoughts are these we clothe
By cadence of,
Margaret, ourselves
In the pageantry of nature’s wood?
A child who steps into the air
Braids the congress of its kiss, sucking
Lace upon the lily-locks
Unfurls By what force? Father:
If we weep for fortune, must we also
Take her eyes? The heart peels back
Its crimson soil, a wreath
In which time, unleaving, did
Row back, backward its small current.

For Federico García Lorca
The moon is an insect, the autumn wind
Brushes it away.