Profiles from China

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Title: Profiles from China
Author: Eunice Tietjens
Release Date: August 5, 2004 [eBook #13118]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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PROFILES FROM CHINA***
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PROFILES FROM CHINA
Sketches in Free Verse of People and Things Seen in the Interior
by
EUNICE TIETJENS
1917
To My Mother
CONTENTS
PROEM
The Hand

FROM THE INTERIOR
Cormorants
A Scholar
The Story
Teller
The Well
The Abandoned God
The Bridge
The Shop

My Servant
The Feast
The Beggar
Interlude
The City Wall

Woman
Our Chinese Acquaintance
The Spirit Wall
The
Most-Sacred Mountain
The Dandy
New China: The Iron Works

Spring
Meditation
Chinese New Year
ECHOES
Crepuscule
Festival of the Dragon Boats
Kang Yi

Poetics
A Lament of Scarlet Cloud
The Son of Heaven
The
Dream
Fêng-Shui
CHINA OF THE TOURISTS
Reflections in a Ricksha
The
Camels
The Connoisseur: An American
Sunday in the British
Empire: Hong Kong
On the Canton River Boat
The Altar of
Heaven
The Chair Ride
The Sikh Policeman: a British Subject

The Lady of Easy Virtue: an American
In the Mixed Court: Shanghai
Proem
Profiles
from
China
The Hand
As you sit so, in the firelight, your hand is the color of
new bronze.
I cannot take my eyes from your hand;
In it, as in a
microcosm, the vast and shadowy Orient
is made visible.
Who shall read me your hand?
You are a large man, yet it is small and narrow, like the
hand of a woman and the paw of a chimpanzee.
It is supple and
boneless as the hands wrought in pigment
by a fashionable portrait painter. The tapering
fingers bend backward.


Between them burns a scented cigarette. You poise it
with infinite daintiness, like a woman under the
eyes of her lover.
The long line of your curved
nail is fastidiousness made flesh.
Very skilful is your hand.
With a tiny brush it can feather lines of
ineffable suggestion,
glints of hidden beauty. With a little
tool it can carve strange dreams
in ivory and
milky jade.
And cruel is your hand.
With the same cold daintiness and skill it can
devise
exquisite tortures, eternities of incredible pain,
that Torquemada
never glimpsed.
And voluptuous is your hand, nice in its sense of
touch.
Delicately it can caress a quivering skin, softly it can
glide over golden thighs.... Bilitis had not
such long nails.
Who can read me your hand?
In the firelight the smoke curls up
fantastically from
the cigarette between your fingers which are the
color of new bronze.

The room is full of strange shadows.
I am afraid of your hand....
From
the
Interior
Cormorants
The boats of your masters are black;
They are filthy with the slimy
filth of ages; like the
canals on which they float they give forth an evil
smell.
On soiled
perches you sit, swung out on either side over

the scummy water--you who should be savage
and untamed, who
should ride on the clean breath
of the sea and beat your pinions in the
strong
storms of the sea.
Yet you are not held.
Tamely you sit and
willingly, ten wretches to a boat,
lurching and half asleep.
Around each throat is a ring of straw, a small ring, so
that you may swallow only small things, such as
your masters desire.

Presently, when you reach the lake, you will dive.
At the word of
your masters the parted waters will
close over you and in your ears will be the gurgling
of yellow streams.

Hungrily you will search in the darkened void, swiftly
you will pounce on the silver shadow....
Then you will rise again,
bearing in your beak the
struggling prey,
And your lousy lords, whose rings are upon your
throats, will take from you the catch, giving in its
place a puny
wriggler which can pass the gates of
straw.
Such is your servitude.
Yet willingly you sit, lurching and half asleep.
The boatmen shout
one to another in nasal discords.
Lazily you preen your great wings, eagle wings,
built for the sky;

And you yawn....
Faugh! The sight of you sickens me, divers in inland
filth!
You grow lousy like your lords,
For you have forgotten the
sea.
Wusih

A Scholar
You sit, chanting the maxims of Confucius.
On your head is a domed
cap of black satin and your
supple hands with their long nails are piously
folded.
You rock to
and fro rhythmically.
Your voice, rising and falling in clear nasal
monosyllables,
flows on steadily, monotonously, like the
flowing of water and the
flowering of thought.
You are chanting, it seems, of the pious
conduct of man
in all ages,
And I know you for a scoundrel.
None the less the maxims of Confucius are venerable,
and your voice pleasant.
I listen attentively....
Wusih
The Story Teller
In a corner of the market-place he sits, his face the target
for many eyes.
The sombre crowd about him is motionless. Behind
their faces no lamp burns; only their eyes