Long Playing Egg Poem

Eggs: Breakfast Burrito, Aliberto's (Fresno)

Song: "Bra" by Cymande (Cymande)    apple music     spotify

Poem: "Returning Late" by Tu Fu (as translated by David Hinton in Awakened Cosmos)

Returning Late
Past midnight, eluding tigers on the road, I return
home in mountain darkness. Family asleep inside,

I watch the Northern Dipper drift low to the river,
and Venus lofting huge into empty space, radiant.

Holding a candle in the courtyard, I call for more
light. A gibbon in the gorge, startled, shrieks once.

Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out:
goosefoot cane, no sleep . . . Catch me if you can!

Notes: Aliberto burrito's got a little swagger. Cymande too. Tu Fu three. 

David Hinton writes about how Tu Fu's Chinese is essentially untranslatable
into English, in part because the original Chinese is stripped of grammar.
There are simply characters on the page, and those characters can be connected
in various ways (whereas English imposes a narrative and grammar to pin down
and control meaning). For example, the characters of the first line are:
night    half     return     come     road     tiger     pass     which Hinton 
translates as "Past midnight, eluding tigers on the road, I return." Hinton sees 
Tu Fu's poetry as consistent with Taoist philosophy, the presence of characters 
emanating out of absence. Maybe this project, the long playing egg poem is 
striving for the same. I'm hoping to put eggs next to music next to poems 
without trying to force how they might relate. I'm also pretty sure I won't always 
do that; the temptation to constellate eggs, music, and poems will be too great.