Profiles from China | Page 4

I saw how one was
broken, torn by the sharp teeth of dogs. A little
tattered dress was
there, and some crunched
bones....
I need not look. What can it help
to look?
Ah, I am past!
And still the sunset glows.
The tall pagoda, like a
velvet flower, blossoms against
the sky; the Sacred Mountain fades, and in the
town a child laughs
suddenly.
I will hold fast to beauty! Who am I, that I should
die for these?
I will go down. I am too sorely hurt, here on the
city wall.
Wusih
Woman
Strangely the sight of you moves me.
I have no standard by which to
appraise you; the outer
shell of you is all I know.
Yet irresistibly you draw me.

Your small plump body is closely clad in blue brocaded
satin. The fit is scrupulous, yet no woman's figure
is revealed. You
are decorously shapeless.
Your satin trousers even are lined with fur.

Your hair is stiff and lustrous as polished ebony, bound
at the neck in an adamantine knot, in which dull
pearls are encrusted.
Your face is young and round and inscrutably alien.
Your complexion
is exquisite, matte gold over-lying
blush pink, textured like ripe fruit.
Your nose is flat, the perfect nose
of China.
Your eyes--your eyes are witchery!
The blank curtain of
your upper lid droops sharply on
the iris, and when you smile the corners twinkle
upward.
It is your
eyes, I think, that move me.
They are so bright, so black!
They are
alert and full of curiosity as the eyes of a
squirrel, and like the eyes of a squirrel they have
no depth behind
them.
They are windows opening on a world as small as your
bound feet, a world of ignorances, and vacuities,
and kitchen-gods.
And yet your eyes are witchery. When you smile you
are the woman-spirit, adorable.
I cannot appraise you, yet strangely the sight of you
moves me.
I believe that I shall dream of you.
Pa-tze-kiao
Our Chinese Acquaintance
We met him in the runway called a street, between the

warrens known as houses.
He looked still the same, but his
French-cut tweeds,
his continental hat, and small round glasses were
alien here.
About
him we felt a troubled uncertainty.
He greeted us gladly. "It is good," he said in his
soft French, "to see my foreign friends again.
You find our city dirty I
am sure. On every stone
dirt grows in China.
How the people crowd! The street is choked.
_No
jee ba_! Go away, curious ones! The ladies
cannot breathe....
No,
my people are not clean. They do not understand,
I think. In Belgium where I studied--
... Yes, I was studying in Bruges,
studying
Christianity, when the great war came.
We, you know,
love peace. I could not see....
"So I came home.
"But China is very dirty.... Our priests are rascals,
and the people ... I do not know.
"Is there, perhaps, a true religion somewhere? The
Greeks died too--and they were clean."
Behind his glasses his slant
eyes were troubled.
"I do not know," he said.
Wusih
The Spirit Wall
It stands before my neighbor's door, between him and

the vegetable garden and the open toilet pots and
the dirty canal.

Not that he wishes to hide these things.
On the contrary, he misses the
view.
But China, you must understand, is full of evil spirits,
demons of the earth and air, foxes and shui-mang
devils, and only the
priest knows what beside.
A man may at any moment be bewitched,
so that his
silk-worms die and his children go blind and he
gets the
devil-sickness.
So living is difficult.
But Heaven has providentially
decreed that these evil
spirits can travel only in a straight line. Around
a corner their power
evaporates.
So my neighbor has built a wall that runs before his
door. Windows of course he has none.
He cannot see his vegetable
garden, and his toilet pots,
and the dirty canal.
But he is quite safe!
Wusih
The Most-Sacred Mountain
Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven,
And this sharp
exultation, like a cry, after the slow
six thousand steps of climbing!
This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the
most holy.
Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks
of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the
floor of earth,
stretches away to blue infinity.
Beside me in this airy space the
temple roofs cut their
slow curves against the sky,
And one black bird circles above the

void.
Space, and the twelve clean winds are here;
And with them broods
eternity--a swift, white peace,
a presence manifest.
The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This
is the end that has no end.
Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years
before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus
into timelessness.

The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that
says: _On this spot once Confucius stood and
felt the smallness of the
world below._
The stone grows old.
Eternity
Is not for stones.
But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift
white peace, this stinging exultation;
And time