true disbelief 79«Someone in a Riot of Stones»
someone in a riot of stones. some-
one like that, a riot of stones like thatcrawler, one hugging the ground
slowly moving, even unmoving lizardathlete leaping amid riotous stones, or
stone falling down on stonesit’s not the one at the foot of an enclosure
the one before the neat and orderly brickworkstops right there when we stare
transfers one stone’s warmth to anotherits shape is six stones overlapping
now, as if craving rainwater, crawls
onto the pictureThis poem certainly isn’t about the trivialities of urban life. Instead,
in one possible reading, it allows the imagination to transform a hu-
man being into a reptile, then athlete, then stone, then human being
again—by negative association: it’s not....—and then, from the fifth
stanza onward, cold-blooded, crawling animal again. The poem dis-
plays no objectivism of any kind. It is syntactically ambiguous, for in-
stance in the connections between the fourth, fifth and sixth stanzas.
It is enigmatic, not to say inaccessible: What enclosure? Is the one at
the foot of the enclosure inside or outside the brickwork? Who are we?
Whose shape is six stones overlapping? What happens next? Yet, the text
is intriguing and it invites multiple rereadings. It also invites the clas-
sification of images as metaphors, as opposed to the professed what-
you-see-is-what-you-get poetics of authors such as Han Dong himself
and his literary soulmate of early days, Yu Jian. Most importantly, the
poetic voice expresses tension, complete engagement and anything but
irony. While «Someone» is in many ways unlike Han Dong’s best-
known works, one thing it has in common with «Of the Wild Goose
Pagoda» and «So You’ve Seen the Sea» as well as with the next three
poems studied here is a feeling of palpable concentration. This poem
handles its metaphors better than happens in many early Obscure po-
ems and other texts that tend toward the Elevated. The metaphors in