Tang Guo – Fissures – translated by Mimi Chang


I touch my body and find many fissures.
I don’t know when they are formed
so I can’t name them one by one.

I can’t compare them with the Grand Canyons of Africa.
At best, they are ditches that a stream of melting snow runs 
slowly through as I walk in the mountains of Dêqên.

I hope someone will walk on the edges of these ditches
just like I am walking here while snow streams slowly.
I want to give you a fissure, a valley

but I don’t know which one to give you.
I lay them all on the earth
like a stall vendor selling her cheap shirts.

If you pick up something dry unfortunately,
I hope there will be spring water running through
when you walk into it.

I hope you will be accompanied by a singing spring
like the snow melting from the White Horse Snow Mountains
running into the small trenches to accompany me as I walk alone.

Tang Guo was born in 1972 in Sichuan province of China but lives in the Dêqên autonomous county of Yunnan, southwest China. As an “internet poet” of the 21st century,  she has published two collections of poems, For You and Zipper—Poems 2000-2014