A New Telling

WARNING

A New Telling

I scrolled my feed back to seventeen,
to decode old captions and the heart between.
Yet line by line I flushed with shame,
too young, too wild, too sure of flame.
I fancied depth, I borrowed sighs,
all melodrama in borrowed guise.
So now I steal old forms anew,
to patch a poem and show it you.

Let us say Xu Xian rode to Chang’an,
while White Snake dwelt in Huainan.
By grace of fate they met by Broken Bridge,
yet stayed like moon in water, bloom in mist.
The scholar was but rootless down,
with empty sleeves, how could he climb?
He only praised the realm in passing,
still stubborn-hearted, raw with time.

Anime, games, and galgame dreams,
consorts crowd the slopes of Lishan.
Advance, and there are lush and wanton tunes;
retreat, and pure love still holds command.
Since ancient days love seldom rounds to wholeness;
only drifting grace keeps floating on.
Why roam famed rivers and mountains at all,
when even one true confidant is hard won?

At times I hear a woodland bird,
and chase the moonlight through my lone shadow.
Shang and Shen still meet again someday;
in this world, no Peach Blossom Pool is easy to find.
Long devotion is like the moon in water,
while worldly dust forever startles waves.
I ask only for a single ladleful,
to drink the chill of moonlight from the cup.

Spring wind warms Yumen Pass;
oranges grow in northern Shaanxi and in Huainan.
Though worldly ties be spent upon the pagoda,
Qinhuai is still only several ranges away.
Spell against spell, tribulation after tribulation,
even if Jinshan floods, a sail remains.
I would tip heaven and earth and overturn the Huai,
wash all of Chang’an with sifted yellow sand.

New text and old affairs divide in two,
right and wrong alike turn dreamlike.
So let the waters of Qinhuai tonight
carry my tangled thoughts back toward Huainan.

Translated in a GPT-5.4 Codex style.

Gu Zheng
2025.5.20
in Xi’an