Ma Wei Slope

I

With a new writing-brush and fresh ink, on paper which seems almost the Imperial yellow, I, Han Im, of the Palace at Chang-an, write this.

Hate, they have said, has no sons. Daughters tend Hate’s tombs and set funeral bowls on the altar—daughters, whose names are not Hate’s name and in whom, soon, Hate’s very name dies. Yet, while they live, these daughters hate, too, in their withdrawn shoulders, their averted eyes, their long, straight, narrow lips. In little, they would be what their father was.

At Chang-an, in snow or summer, there in the Palace, and at the Palace’s centre, the Emperor. Round him move guards and gardeners, slaves and favourites, men and half-men. At Chang-an, in snow, no beauty is so white as Yang Kuei-fei, the Favourite. In summer, no blossom nears her cheek’s perfection. On painted fan, on pencilled bamboo, on chased stone, a thousand poems ape immortality to tell that she is unsurpassed. Since the great emperors of six hundred years ago, no love poems have been allowed to outlive their subject. Instead, men write now of Earth and Heaven, of travels and loneliness, and their poems are preserved. In the breath of the living, only, live the love songs which I no more can truly sing.

I write of what happens near me, making sons of my words, where my loins can never serve me. In these frettings of a paper surface I set my unruly offspring, to bring a sigh to later years or perhaps to curve in laughter the narrow, lovely lips of such as shall follow Mistress Yang Kuei-fei in the years that must be to come.

HAN IM.

At Chang-an.

Summer night, in the period of Small Heat.