Polydactylism
Zhou Mengdie

Is it a pair of antlers
that a gazelle left hanging here?
Or is it a vacant stare, left behind
at Waiting Rock?*

Who is to say after the Five Seasons
there is no Sixth?
High in the cliffs, I faintly hear
spring on its tightrope, shivering
and again shivering.

Yesterday you were a snowdrift,
today you are spring grass
beneath the snowdrift,
hazy with awakening.
Whose is the luck-bringing magpie,
carrying in its mouth
a skyful of red clouds
on plum twigs of the Fifth Month?

From beyond the rainbow, birds
come flying;
from beyond the birds, a rainbow
comes gushing—
your hidden thoughts are a herd of sheep
that walked out over the mountainside
and know no way back home,
seeing only peak on peak
of shades of autumn.

The wind that came from cactus country
goes back into cactus
with a clang, and Contemplation’s on.
From now on, after the Five Seasons
there’ll be no more Sixth
till Contemplation wakens from the wind,
till nimbly as a butterfly
you waken from the wind.