{"id":192,"date":"2012-02-02T12:47:21","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T12:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/?p=192"},"modified":"2012-02-02T12:51:20","modified_gmt":"2012-02-02T12:51:20","slug":"tian-zhu-jiao-the-teaching-of-the-lord-of-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/2012\/02\/tian-zhu-jiao-the-teaching-of-the-lord-of-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"Tian Zhu Jiao (The Teaching of the Lord of Heaven)"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar<\/em><\/p>\n

1. Sextant<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dreamt last night of Matteo Ricci.
\nDreamt he was on the sunnier side
\nof the Great Wall, that dragon of bricks
\nwith all those bones in its guts
\neating a won-ton soup from a
\ngleaming porcelain bowl. Hard to believe:
\nI know. This Italian had strode into the Ming
\nCourt, business as usual, probably
\nthe same year Shaxper agonised himself
\ninto moving that paltry distance down to Londontown.
\nHe stood in the modern ultraviolet
\nsunlight, serious-faced. He kind of looked
\nlike me, crossed with Gary Oldman.<\/p>\n

Ultra-Jesuit, too, he wore Confucian garb,
\nsave the shoes, a pair of dated
\npenny-loafers. He slurped at the last, and grinned
\nat me, and gestured off to the side,
\nout of the way of blinking flashes from
\nthe new wave of pre-Olympic tourist
\ncameras. We went then secretly
\ninto a small room in the wall, and he
\nshowed me his sextant, leering.<\/p>\n

“N’inquiete pas,”<\/em> he suggested, and repeated
\nin Italian, then tried English: “We have
\ntons of time, my friend,” he grinned,
\nstroking the face of the map on the wall,
\nand humming softly to himself.<\/p>\n

“Cathay will split like fruit, and we will get
\nat the core, brush the seeds with our own hands.”
\nHis fingertips brushed the straits of Taiwan,
\nhis other hand pressed against southerly Hainan.
\nHis sextant was no good,
\nnot even the tangent screw
\ncould achieve anything
\nat that point. It was daytime.
\nAnd all the maps in the world won’t get you
\nanywhere near the trembling peaks of Taishan.<\/p>\n

2. N.B. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Hsi Lien tells me her stint in Hong Kong and Kowloon
\nwas, wait for it, dis-orienting<\/em>. You can hear the trap set,
\nba-dum-dum, as she raises one eyebrow
\nabove a delicate epicanthic fold, Canton piquant.
\nWe spent hours in shopping malls, discussing Mao Zedong
\nin the context of ostensible poetry, and puzzling
\ntogether definitions of democracy, and guzzling
\nmead, and the correlation between cognizance and doom.<\/p>\n

We spoke of how the Chinese saw the moon,
\nrabbit-adorned. Strange irony, that afternoon
\nscrambling after the name of that Quebecois doctor,
\nonly for her to remember it rhymed with “bathroom”.<\/p>\n

3. Meat Rabbits<\/strong><\/p>\n

are a staple agricultural product of the region
\nof Guangdong; the place abounds in meat
\nrabbits, dead Jesuits, strange signs and sequined miracles,
\nI discover.<\/p>\n

It’s weird, the things people will pay you to edit.<\/p>\n

Guangdong sky full of shining crosses, village men
\nswearing they saw the ghost of Matteo Ricci wander past
\nthe graves on Sunday morning last. Cannons, muskets,
\nsextants, all risen like the important dead, imported to
\nproselytize loudly with voices; somehow this doesn’t move me.<\/p>\n

More moving by far, the fleeing Ming court
\nheaded southward from Beijing, Helena
\n(the Emperor’s mother’s Christian name)
\npenning ideogrammatic prayers to Mary
\nand Christ for the restoration of rightness
\non Earth by heaven; begging the Pope
\nfor prayers and heavenly warriors.<\/p>\n

More moving by far to read of Scholar Wang Zheng,
\notherwise great man, unfortunate convert by words
\nof a Jesuit but still refused to cast his concubine
\nout, swearing to the Lord of Heaven, Christ, that he’d
\nnot touch her again, but retain her with dignity,
\nrather than sell or murder her.<\/p>\n

More moving by far, the imperial roll of all that weight:
\nthe collapsing world of the Ming world smashing directly
\ndown around Scholar Wang Zheng, snuffing out the sun
\nin him, whose concubine, not his wife, found the wound,
\nof his suicide. More moving, by far, that wrinkle
\nin the page, the reassuring itch of abandoned faith.<\/p>\n

4. Taishan and the Night Bus<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve earned my right to talk at Taishan, on
\na dozen buses like this one, coughing polite
\nand wondering if they think the pink bows in
\ntheir black hair is really hao kan<\/em>. You can tell
\na girl from the Old Country by how she picks
\nthe colors of the ribbons tied in her hair.<\/p>\n

I’ve sat on trains where the whispers clatter
\nfrom the skin of the windows, rattling along
\nthrough the arched hollow of the tunnel at night;
\nheard them asking, “Where is that one going?”<\/p>\n

You’d think I’d have come to Taishan already,
\npicked my way to the top and yelled out some word
\nmemorized from whomever else yells it first.
\nClimbed up, and found whatever people find there,
\nand then climbed straight back down, with drooping
\nmustaches white from age and wisdom and stuff.<\/p>\n

But I only ever have gotten as far as Badai-ling,
\ngazed fished-eyed out all the rockiness and the quiet
\nthat the wall ensealed, my arm leaning on ideogram
\ngraffittoes, the voices of hawkers and braying camels
\nready to be mounted for a photograph, you! you!
\nWalls are marvelous things, lasting forever,
\nmonuments to the past. I yawn, raise my Pentax up.<\/p>\n

– 2000-2007, Montreal; Iksan, Jeonju, & Bucheon, South Korea<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

This poem was published in Diet Soap<\/em> #3 (2009), which may or may not still be available as a free PDF here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gord Sellar 1. Sextant Dreamt last night of Matteo Ricci. Dreamt he was on the sunnier side of the Great Wall, that dragon of bricks with all those bones in its guts eating a won-ton soup from a gleaming porcelain bowl. Hard to believe: I know. This Italian had strode into the Ming Court, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems-canada"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xIep-36","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}