Landscape with a Hundred Turns, de Yanyi

When you turned into a hundred rooms,

I returned each month as a door

that opened only one.

When you turned into a hundred rooms

the wind flung through

each of them wailing

and left a hundred songs

in hopes you would return for it

and me and

once, finding a doe locked up,

the trees blued up

the mountain pass, I understood

you had transformed into your multiple,

as the rain is different

each step from the moon. Sleeping

in a hundred rooms, a hundred dreams

of you appear—though by day

your voice has frozen into standing stones.

When you turned into a hundred rooms,

I met with a mirror in each eye

your growing absence.

When I moved, the shadows without you

followed me. In the hundred rooms,

I cannot pick one,

for each combines into the other

where I piece-by-piece the shadows

you have ceased

to remember. As the rain

is different each day of the year,

when I turned for you

and hoped you’d return to me,

was it I who left

and you who remained the same?

For when you changed,

I changed

the furniture in the rooms.

A hundred birds flew over a hundred fields.

A mountain flowed into a hundred rivers

then ended.

via Chris de Gel

In a hundred rooms,

I turned and turned,

hoping to return to you.

O, the chrysanthemums grew

in the hundred rooms!

Far in the past and far in the future

were those numinous and echoing stars.