Elizabeth Macklin
The Virtues of Red Dragon–Hard
Shanghai Mahjongg@coastclick.com
No language for a minute, no language at all for a minute
or minutes on end—no trope of any kind! That goes for any
language—any language at all.
Just sight—by sight—when you sit back, suspense or sadness, wordless,
and like Dream–Very Easy and Towers–Easy and in Cloud–Normal
there in Red Dragon–Hard are the Flowers and Winds, the Winds
and the Seasons. Remembering glancingly—that’s what the drug’s for.
I don’t like to think what we’re thinking, think what I’m thinking
as the reefs bleach, fact of the matter.
I’m glad I went out tonight and ran into a philosopher.
You’ve gone and you’ve got some done, he said. So enough for now.
Why not scout out priorities in Red Dragon–Hard—
once learned, it’s second nature? But don’t believe me.
The new game is always a new game, I thought. Nothing’s the same
as it was. But there with the tiles on the table—
Circular, Bamboo, Character—no language needed.
And the new algorithms make change—a relief!
Resisting the easy “Sad!” Finally, the score is immaterial.
But I’m here resisting every task I was given, I said.
Despite algorithms, you cannot predict the future, he answered.
All you need to do this minute is resist easy.
Thich Nhat Hahn was at peace in wartime, if only for minutes.
Suffering’s not enough, he suggested. We don’t need
to go to China to enjoy the blue sky.
Sovereignty over ourselves, he called it.
Not drowned in forgetfulness.
Finally, whatever the score was was immaterial.
And there’s no way to replay the game.
You can’t get bored, since it never repeats.
No way to replay a game.
I said I heard they did it just like this on the prairie,
back when teamsters had teams, with their round of days.
And that made this day different.
But the perfect sadness of why they are now unable
to even conceive, can’t stand to believe, and cling
to the same damned previous game forever.
Of course they blame the vaccine,
pushed by that gene in the air
to avert—turn away—what could help them.
But now: Flowers Any, you’re blessedly left with patchwork
to look at—a ship, blue-violet Sparrows for sails. The whole
unfortunate layout. But now you get to say the, at least.
It’s a definite article, and it’s the!
After the hours of calling unlimited minutes—
It’s was, and the crowd are going wild!
Hardy in Python, Roth on Louis—
it could work in the streets, if bottled:
just do the best you can with what you have.
Elizabeth Macklin is the author of the poetry collections You’ve Just Been Told (Norton, 2000) and A Woman Kneeling in the Big City (Norton, 1992). She translated the Basque poet Kirmen Uribe’s Bitartean Heldu Eskutik (Meanwhile Take My Hand), published by Graywolf in 2007. Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review, among others. Her awards include the Ingram Merrill poetry prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and a PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center.
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