I’m a Frightened Monkey
I’m a frightened monkey who’s read T’ao Ch’ien
a tired work horse left out in the rain
a black worm turning in a concubine
a face made from thousands of face scraps.One of my dead wives will be here any moment
and she will call me a lazy dung heap.
“But he is Su Tung-p’o! How dare you
speak of him like that,” Master Monkey will say.Why don’t we all drink some wine
and live like we die tomorrow?
I wrote a much better poem than this
but Monkey fed it to a mountain lion.
Su Tung-p’o (1037-1101) wrote a rather odd poem entitled “I’m a Frightened Monkey Who’s Reached the Forest” using the rhymes of a poem by T’ao Ch’ien, hence Cheng Hui’s (fl. 1210) reference to T’ao in the opening line. I must confess I have no idea what Cheng Hui is up to here. Is he honoring Su Tung-p’o or dancing on his head? Is the “black worm” a sexually transmitted disease? The fourth line of the poem--with the bizarre image of “face scraps”--could also be translated as “a blanket made from scraps of old clothing” or “a fire made from embers of a previous fire.” Su’s first two wives died of mysterious circumstances, but why does Cheng have Su Tung-p’o drag them into this? Sometimes Cheng makes me want to gargle with Pine Sol.
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