Li Bai stopped at pubs a lot.
He liked to get drunk.
He liked to tip the singers.
He liked to hear the folk songs.
No folk songs in Nevada,
Not counting streaming country
Pop or the siren jingles
Of three dusty slot machines.
How would an asyntactic,
Calligraphic, terse,
But soulful Chinese poet
Find his way in this setting?
Five diners. Windows. Five words.
Wine. Server. Busboy. Talk. Birds.
No, we can’t do it.
We can’t be asyntactic
And imagistic
And soulful and rhyme.
We don’t have the pictographs,
The Mandarin, the folk songs
Stored up in us in order
To accomplish
The lyric equivalent
Of binding our feet.
And we’re just not drunk.
The busboy complains
To the middle-aged server
That although he’s great
Making friends with other guys
He just can’t make it
With the girls. The server laughs,
And then she explains to him,
“All you gotta do’s relax.”
Outside arched windows
Occasional birds fly by.
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