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). 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.