Luo Yi's Poems

The Second Dream
I dreamed I was at a meeting
behind the podium somebody was babbling on
about transcendentalism

I was sitting in the audience. Secretly
I started practising floating by holding
my body a millimetre above the chair

I was bored and the person went on talking. Secretly
I started practising weight-bearing floating by holding
my sitting posture with the chair a millimetre off the floor

I was still bored and the person was still talking
So I flew out of the window
It was already dark outside
I could do nothing else: that's how the kind of meeting it was like


Nut Tarō
One day
I picked up a nut by the river
I peeled off its shell and came out Time
I caressed and smoothed its folded skin and taught it how to walk

God be my witness
It has been 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang
(I got this from Wikipedia)
I threw away the nutshell long ago


Pok Gai
Yesterday I salvaged an old cupboard from the bottom of the lake
I lost all my strength but kept walking
Until, dizzy, I fell flat on the ground
(in a Cantonese movie they called this Pok Gai -- crushed onto the street) 
Having no strength to even crawl
I saw that the other people who also had Pok Gai
They were watching me
Grass grew out of their bodies
Then snow covered them
I couldn’t help but be happy
I wouldn’t be resentful anymore
because now I was the same as them


City
A huge cake
grows puffy in the oven
It thickens
but lacks dimensions


Long Distance Love
A and B are two dots on a plane
Most of the time
We tend to measure the distance between them
The rest of the time
We tend to personify A and B
(into a man and woman for example)
And roll up the paper so they can meet


How to Wake Up the Princess
Draw a silver line from the origin--
extend it but don’t bend it, so both ends of the line
meet at infinity. Then tie a knot.
At that moment the spell-bound princess
will awaken in the castle
She will remove the silver line from her hair,
and yawn and stretch. Then she will get onto
an ox with a silver back and leave.
Her whereabouts will never be known. 


The Piano Player
A young man is playing a piano
One note seems to be jumping out
Another keeps hiding itself
The notes are not ready
to be tamed
by this brown-haired young man



The original poems are in Chinese, translated into English by me, edited by Robert Berold.

Here is Luo Yi's Blog: wreninhernest