From Liang Yue Xian: Like the Autumn Clouds, They Are Gone

From Liang Yue Xian: Like the Autumn Clouds, They Are Gone

From Liang Yue Xian: Like the Autumn Clouds, They Are Gone

花样的年华，
来如春梦不多时，
去似秋云无觅处。

Only the water now,
slapping against the Vyner Brooke
as she stands astern and watches China

slipping away, the man with a kerosene lamp
on the dock, growing small, swallowed up in a maze of lights
that recede to a dull red glow upon the horizon and then subside

into night, and so, a whole world slips away in the wash of a ship,
the selves she could have been all laid to rest
in the dust of the city she has lived in.

She looks for the girl who steps out
of a library and elbows her way
through a crowded street.
She is gone.

Like flowers, the days of my youth—
they came like the sweet breath of spring
in my dreams, like the autumn clouds
they are gone where they cannot be found.