The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology Read online

  cide?”

  * * *

  A voice from beyond my peripheral vision says, “You’re nothing

  but a pseudo-Kantian neoliberal mirage with meta-narcissistic

  tendencies.”

  * * *

  “No, I’m not.”

  * * *

  “Yes, you are.”

  * * *

  “No. I’m not.”

  * * *

  “Yes. You are.’”

  VIII

  In the district of Hóu-tcheou-fou, the magistrate’s assistant

  Chen was taking a nap in his cabinet of pain. Suddenly, a mo-

  torized airport staircase appeared, and beckoned him to follow.

  It led Chen down a path hidden by rustling thickets of bamboo

  to a clearing where, on a high pedestal, an enormous mirror

  waited in the moonlight.

  * * *

  “Regard what you once were in your previous life,” said the stair-­

  case. Looking into the mirror, Chen saw a donkey muzzled with

  wire. The beast gazed sadly back at him from its muddy pen.

  Hummingbirds the color of spilled oil flitted across the frame.

  * * *

  “Now see what you were in the life before that one.”

  * * *

  Rubbing his eyes, Chen looked again. This time, he saw a girl

  wringing a bloody rag out of an upper-story window. Her lips

  appeared to be moving, but Chen couldn’t make out the words

  to the song.

  * * *

  “Again,” said the vehicle.

  * * *

  Chen peered into the mirror once more. Where the girl had

  been, he now saw a high official in old Ming costume—black

  cap, red dragonfly robe, belt with jade buckle—bent over a faded

  map of some unfamiliar region.

  * * *

  Just then a disheveled servant rushed into the clearing, pros-

  trated himself before Chen, and exclaimed, “Don’t you recog-

  nize me? I was your valet in Tá-t’oung-fou, but of course that

  was over two hundred years ago.” Rising to his feet, he handed

  Chen a scroll.

  * * *

  “What’s this?” Chen asked dreamily.

  * * *

  “See for yourself,” the servant replied. “It will clear your name.”

  * * *

  [DRAFT ONLY; PLEASE DO NOT CIRCULATE—trans.]

  * * *

  [CE N’EST QU’UN PROJET; NE CIRCULENT PAS, SVP—

  trans.]

  * * *

  [JǏN GÒNG FÉIFǍ SHǏYÒNG; QǏNG BÙYÀO XÚNHUÁN—

  trans.]

  IX

  Our sitter called in sick yesterday, so I stayed home with Mira,

  watching a tree squirrel tuck twigs and trash into her wreck of

  a nest outside the kitchen window instead of prepping for class.

  * * *

  “I love eyebrows,” my daughter announced in an access of uni-­

  versal grammar. “I love napkins. I love upstairs.”

  * * *

  On the radio, a woman with a faded Northern Irish accent de-

  scribed efforts to restore various archaeological sites in and

  around the provincial capital of Al Hillah, where the ancient

  Mesopotamian city of Babylon once stood.

  * * *

  Speaking through an interpreter, a government official re­-

  counted how the 2,600-year-old paving stones of the ancient

  city’s Processional Way had been crushed under the treads of

  M1 Abrams tanks. A heliport had been constructed amid the

  ruins. Wreathed in concertina wire, the remains of a ziggurat

  which some scholars believe may be the original site of the

  Tower of Babel, however, appeared to be largely intact for the

  time being.

  * * *

  “I love flowers. I love fire,” Mira continued, upending her fruit

  cup. “I love foreheads, too.”

  * * *

  At some point in the day, Song left me a message, but I couldn’t

  make anything of it. Later that evening, I inspected the bath-

  room mirror to see if I could discern any trace or infractions

  from a previous life. All I saw was the chipped and tarnished

  face of the mirror itself. I looked again. This time, to my relief,

  a man dressed as a scholar from the recent past—vintage cardi-

  gan, thinning hair, an untenured affect of worry beyond repair

  —squinted out from the far side of the glass.

  * * *

  “I love forks,” he recited, floating toward me like an antediluvian

  grouper in a Chinese restaurant fish tank. “I love flags. I love

  ziggurats, too.”

  XIV

  Please print clearly and remember your name.

  * * *

  1) The river of fire, in ancient Greek thanatopography, feeds into

  the river of ________.

  * * *

  2) From the river of pain spring two rivers—the river of

  ________ and the river of ________.

  * * *

  3) The river of ________ runs a separate course entirely, con-

  cealed inside the Greek word for truth.

  * * *

  4) At the sight of sinners approaching, the ________ seethes

  “like butter in a frying pan.”

  * * *

  5) ________ is the Sanskrit river of ash.

  * * *

  6) As the sun god Ra floats down the river of the hidden

  chamber, his head is exchanged for that of a ________.

  * * *

  7) Those for whom much lamentation is made find the

  ________ swollen with tears and difficult to cross.

  * * *

  8) To our knowledge, the river of ________ has no name.

  XVI

  A student visited my office the day before yesterday with some

  questions concerning her midterm exam. Apparently I’d been

  a little dismissive of her worldview in my comments. As the con-

  versation wore on, I found myself explaining that it would have

  been physically impossible for Dante to crawl through the

  center of Earth because, as everybody knows, the planet’s core

  is very hot.

  * * *

  “But he went all the way through and saw the stars again,” the

  girl insisted. “Are you calling him a liar?”

  * * *

  She had been homeschooled in a rural area downstate, and oc­-

  casionally required some additional learning support on my

  part. Once more, I tried to explain that nobody could pass

  through the world and come out the other side. It would be meta-

  physically implausible. Studying a loose tile on the ceiling, my

  visitor, whose name regrettably escapes me, seemed uncon-

  vinced.

  * * *

  “When I get to heaven,” she rose suddenly to go, her face flushed,

  “I will ask Dante.”

  * * *

  Classes were letting out for the day. The antiquated streetlamps

  had begun to flicker on, one by one, across the main quad. Con-

  sulting my watch, I worried that I might be late for my appoint-

  ment.

  * * *

  “And what if he ended up in the other place?” I inquired, show-

  ing the girl out the door.

  * * *

  “Then you ask him.”

  Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi

  Translated from the Chinese written by Yi
Lei

  My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree

  One of shortest poems in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree creates — in just five lines! — a lasting theological perspective: “When life ends, / Memory endures. / When memory ends, / What persists /Attests to the spirit.” Such a larger-than-life — and yet also such a delicate — approach distinguishes this collection as it gathers poems of eros and grief, each page bursting with attentiveness to our world. “Each blade of grass is a glorious eye,” Yi Lei writes, echoing, and also revising, Whitman. In very beautiful versions by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi, Yi Lei’s voice here becomes invigorating, lasting poetry in English.

  Furtive

  A black squall blankets the earth.

  The stubborn are drenched, worn down.

  Even dreams are slick and choked with moss.

  * * *

  Is meeting out of habit any worse

  Than coming clean? I can’t let go

  Of this clipping lifted from your wife’s garden.

  * * *

  Time and again, my voice storms up in a rage,

  Weeps back down in tatters.

  Such secrecy unravels me. Still,

  My heart harbors a furtive joy.

  (Why must I whisper?)

  * * *

  I’ve been careless with your letters, which lie scattered,

  Lost. My name for you creeps off

  Like a plant that has overgrown its pot.

  * * *

  * * *

  June 15, 1986

  Red Wall

  Hot. Having burned me but also

  Warmed me. I regard it from a distance.

  The flowers choking it, bleeding onto it,

  Red legacy binding our generations.

  From below, we thousands cast upon it a

  beatific, benighted, complacent, complicit,

  decorous, disconsolate, distracted, expectant,

  execrative, filthy, grievous, guileless,

  hallowed, hotheaded, hungry, incredulous,

  indifferent, inscrutable, insubordinate, joyful,

  loath, mild, peace-loving, profane, proud,

  rageful, rancorous, rapt, skeptical, terrified,

  tranquil, unperturbed, unrepentant,

  warring eye.

  * * *

  * * *

  October 31, 1987

  As Clear and Thus as Virtuous as Glass

  I am as clear and thus as virtuous as glass.

  To see through me, you need only glance.

  Smash me to shards with the rap of a fist.

  But to reach me, to really enter in,

  You must travel an unfathomable distance.

  * * *

  * * *

  December 5, 1987

  In the Distance

  Out past the horizon

  And delimited by an

  Unsentimental fog—

  * * *

  Past the farthest green grasses,

  The flowers fading and blossoming,

  Falls the torrent, the monsoon

  In which a woman exalts, day and night,

  Her face danced upon

  By rainwater—

  * * *

  Out past distant heaven

  And remotest earth

  And the outer banks of the heart—

  * * *

  Past the curve of the horizon,

  Neither hazy nor clear,

  Where every night is a new celebration

  To which your wise self and its foolish twin,

  In a seamless incarnation,

  Accompany you—

  * * *

  * * *

  April 28, 1992

  Heavy Rain

  A woman showers in the rain—

  A woman in the desert—

  Fresh steam rising from her ribs.

  * * *

  She thinks, yes,

  The beasts of the earth work in contentment.

  Every tree, male or female, is delicate,

  Watching at a lover’s window in heavy rain.

  Or else they are disconsolate giants,

  Their debate having ages ago been settled.

  * * *

  Let the dark man leave.

  Let the queen wait alone in her carriage of rain.

  The eternal

  Arrives when the rain

  Arrives.

  * * *

  * * *

  December 23, 1991

  canadian

  SHORTLIST

  Joseph Dandurand

  The East Side of It All

  Joseph Dandurand is a poet-storyteller. Portraying Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside’s prostitutes, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and abused, his autobiographical poems could easily drown in the brutality and tragedy they capture — but instead they heal. These are deeply moving spiritual invocations, extricated from poisoned air by a fallen angel. Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation, located on the Fraser River, near Vancouver. His origin and roots are the sources of wisdom and myths, which he masterly embeds in a drama of a dysfunctional modern society. His crystalline clear and remarkably multilayered poems are written in an unforgettable voice of someone who is telling a story in order to survive and to go on. A story of a man who has become a sasquatch, through writing.

  The Shame of Man

  He is buried somewhere

  in a prison of fools. He gets

  his meals and a good night’s

  sleep but he will be gone forever

  and most of us do not care

  one way or the other

  but for our people—

  we are the ones who paid

  the price as our mothers and sisters

  disappeared on his pig farm

  a few miles upriver from

  where he had taken them.

  Now they are just a memory

  but we never forget—

  as we never forget.

  * * *

  On any given night

  they say he would hunt

  like all predators downtown

  and he’d have his pick

  of the already lost and forgotten.

  He would pick his target

  and bring her back to the farm

  where he would keep her

  for a few days, feeding her drugs.

  * * *

  Once the desire was

  too overwhelming

  he would attack

  and explode

  with his inner demons.

  He would choose life

  or death

  and in our case

  it was

  always death.

  * * *

  With the plunge of the knife

  or the cold grasp of his filthy hands

  he would end them and

  bury them in the back.

  * * *

  As the new day began,

  the pigs of the world would feast.

  * * *

  If I could change time

  I would wait for the stinking pickup

  and that little man in his big boots to appear.

  I would follow him and as he picked up my sister,

  I would follow him and when he got home upriver,

  I would hop the fence and I would get to him

  before he could do her any harm and I would

  plunge a cold blade into his eye

  or I would wrap my hands around his neck

  and watch him slip away

  and then I would bury him in the back.

  * * *

  My sister and I would return to the city

  to await the next predator
<
br />   and we would do the same.

  * * *

  But that never happened

  and we still search and search for our sisters

  as they disappear

  and all I can do is stare at my hands

  as they strangle an imaginary evil

  who still to this day has a nice bed,

  a good meal, a lifetime of knowing

  he was more than a pig farmer.

  Street Healer 1

  He goes out at night and walks

  slowly. They say he fell from

  the sky several decades ago

  but now he is a fully grown