As If In a Dream

by Emerald Lin (NYU)

Dusk at the riverside pavilion

         & it’s the second day of spring.

The sky so blue, caught & reflected in the smooth panes of glass buildings

reaching up, caught & reflected

the lozenges of a river

Drunk, the way back lost

         & I walk down the blocks, the unpaved asphalt streets the yellow

helmets the construction sites the dust the scaffolds

torn, opening into a sudden gasp of breath opening into endless

blue, warmth—

Poling the late boat home, straying

         like a fish, I walk down the blocks

         swimmingly

         April dipping her toes into summer, &

         it’s a day where everything is alive excessively,

         green usurping the pinks & whites & spilling

Into thick lotus blossoms,

         into the blue of the sky, the green, the green, the green,

the grief,

Pushing and pulling,

inside the windows people find their places in the glass buildings

I swim past the bottom, outside—

what a funny thing to say that I look

at an empty summer & see only emptiness when

Pushing and pulling,

         everything’s so alive. The green brimming out of the park.

         Around the corner someone is singing an old classic love song I hadn’t

         known that I’d known, the ghost of a forgotten love

Startling into flight a shore of egrets and gulls,

         awakening in the present &

darling, what a day to be alive.

The italicized lines are from "As If In a Dream" by Li Qingzhao. The title taken from Ronald Egan's translation.