Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Sinica Leidensia, 86)

true disbelief 81

stand close together, like the underground rocks that share everything.
The darkness between the trees is of a distancing, mutually unwelcom-
ing kind. The observation that it forbids strangers to enter projects
the darkness back from the trees onto human beings and the central
scene of the four people walking off in four directions. Finally there is a
double distancing, not just among the people in the poem, and among
the trees, but also between the people and the trees on the one hand,
and the speaker on the other. This is visible in the clinical, objectify-
ing formula I notice (៥⊼ᛣࠄ), in the poem’s first line and its last, and
most of all in its closing words: I am not in the forest, meaning ‘I am not
among those people or those trees.’ Thus, «There Is a Darkness» ques-
tions people’s ability to establish and maintain company and contact.
This happens elsewhere in Han Dong’s oeuvre too, as we will see in
the next two poems. Take «See» (ⳟ, 1990), for instance:^23

«See»

see you

and see him

but neither of you

can see each other

in the middle there’s a wall

a tree

or mist

I am beside the wall

above the tree

I am the mist itself

but both of you can

see me at the same time

you can see me

now see the one

then turn to the other

I am the wall

the tree

the mist itself

any thing

(^23) Han 2002: 126-127.