Translated by Austin Woerner and Bao Huiyi
Now all I need to do is carefully differentiate

between each dull ache, name it, add a footnote,

     lock it up

in the correct drawer: which tears I shed

for my suffering father, which for frostbitten love,

which came just from shivering in this vast,

     indifferent

prison of stars in which we all live. If each small pain

could be precisely located, like troubles in Yogacara

     buddhism,

they would, like sins in Dante’s funnel, become

     bearable.
Every pain I refuse to, won’t stoop to, or simply

     cannot pour out

will congeal into brown, olive, and silver spices

brewing miracles in the holy-water bottle of time.

Rhetoric evaporates before a suffering heart, speech

     becomes frivolous,

and if not done in order to save oneself

narration is unforgivable. If I could take a piece of

     sky-blue chalk

into this maze, and mark every forking

that leads to disasters: “I have been here, I will not

be tempted again” then they would become

     bearable. 
If all my tastes of mercury and arsenic

could exempt you from understanding this poem

—they would become bearable,

little patient.