*All works previously published in “The Book of Mirrors”, White Pine Press, 2021

 

 

Liebestraum

 

A tree blooms in the night sky
Each star a flower forbidden

A stranger plays the piano
pulses light to shadow

A million trees bend with weight
of gravitating dark matter

Each star’s love unrequited
Every planet a path not taken

The stranger’s coat darkens the night
Strands of hair brush his pale face

Winter plum blossoms stir starlight
A scented portal in time

In the singing of forgotten dreams
I step through and drown

 

 

 

 

 

Nocturne I

 

The one I have waited for
will not be coming

Only dogs and thieves

The moon bleeds
in the hilltop pond

Bamboos strangle my hut
A lamp burns for no one

Should I burn down the bridge

 

 

 

 

 

Muse with a Brown Paper Bag

 

Wear a boa of black tulips and nothing else
Examine dirt through an electron-tunneling microscope
Knock on a lichen door of limestone boulders in a jade river
Hunt fossil ferns and shoulder the bones of flying dinosaurs

Who is afraid of poetry

Rap to the beat of bat wings in a cave
Lecture rapists about the spirituality of sex
Commune with the dead by living their darkest fantasies
Consider cutting off one of your ears

The doorknob is a cat’s voice

Poetry is a spread of black and white photos
of loners in leather and lace
Muse is a grumpy old man with wooden doorknobs
He replaces your doorknob with his own

The doorknob tortures you

You dig up the floor get splinters in search of purple diamonds
You shape blood-mixed dirt into a bead necklace
hang it around your neck and pose in a cemetery
The doorknob bursts into laughter

 

 

 

 

 

Flowers in the Mirror

 

She bolts the door to meet the man inside the mirror. Peach blossom petals rain down. Long hair drapes down his bare shoulders. He beckons, a knowing smile on his face luminous as jade. A siren shrieks by outside.

Fledglings abandoned the nest as leaves yellowed on the phoenix tree.

Love is an illusion, born of misunderstandings. She dreams in the empty house. Aliens land in
LA, and uproot palm trees to use as toothpicks. She is a tiny fish on a silver platter, screaming,
voiceless.

White-ridged mountains: sprigs of snowflakes from the space station.

Sunlight throbs translucent hollows of morning glories. Someone hugs her from behind. She is afraid to open her eyes. The mind blooms. The moon ripples in the water, a corridor from here to eternity.

 

 

 

 

 

The Burren

 

The cream pony gallops towards me
on the way to the hilltop cemetery

A thousand years of gravestones surround
black bones of a forgotten church

Dogs bark and someone rustles in the grass
Beyond the sunlit landscape the sea grays

* * *

Waves crash into cliffs and bloom
hundreds of feet into the air

Unnamed wildflowers whisper my name
My heart freezes on the deserted trail

Vertical cliffs wall up the sea
A vast bowl stretches into the horizon

No ship on the horizon no one waits for me
I saw it all in the pony’s green eyes

* * *

The village hugs a river cascade
dropping hundreds of bolts of silk

Along the forest canopy’s crack
a little stream reflects fuchsia foxgloves

A tree daisy watches with ten thousand eyes
My swan dream turns into a butterfly

Heed not the call from the sea
Cliff-hung wildflowers cup moonlight

 

 

 

 

 

The Butterfly

 

The day after I buried my father’s ashes on a mountain, a giant black swallowtail languidly glided over camellias. My father was old Wang. The first Wang, a dashing teenage prince, died in 547 BC. Thirty years later, the ailing king dreamed the prince descended on a white crane, playing the sheng.

I dreamed of the future, where a man stands trial for loneliness. I defend him, noting that, in my own time, so long ago, loneliness was the human condition. In another dream, I consort with an intimate stranger. He holds my hands, gazes into my eyes, in a valley of towering statues ringed by turquoise mountains.

Legend made the prince immortal. He ascended in moon-glow from a mountain-top, his white robe dancing the wind. The butterfly was Zhuang Zi dreaming this world. Or my father, returning with dark wings embossed with silver and emerald.

Moonlight fills me through shut eyelids. I melt into the lucid stream.

 

 

 

 

 

About the author:

Yun Wang’s poetry books include “The Book of Mirrors” (White Pine Press, 2021), “The Book of Totality” (Salmon Poetry Press, 2015), and “The Book of Jade” (Story Line Press, 2002), as well as a book of translation, “Dreaming of Fallen Blossoms: Tune Poems of Su Dong-Po” (White Pine Press, 2019), and the translation of Dao De Jing (the Daoist scripture) as poetry (in collaboration with Li-Young Lee, W.W. Norton 2024). Wang is a cosmologist at California Institute of Technology, focusing on developing NASA space missions to explore the Universe.

 

In the artist’s words:

Lennie Duensing: In 1956, my parents gave me a Brownie Holiday camera for my eighth birthday, and I’ve been taking pictures ever since. During the late 60s, while still in college, I set up a darkroom in my New York City apartment and worked as a portrait and dance photographer. After graduation, I was employed as the full-time photographer for a New Jersey community college, and during the 70s and early 80s, I worked as a photojournalist, primarily covering arts and entertainment stories for two New Jersey newspapers.

In the years that followed, while working as the education program manager and producer at New York City’s PBS station, directing two art museums and a national medical organization, I continued documenting my personal journey through photographs. A few years ago, after retiring, I began photographing those things in life that had always given me the most pleasure: circus, musicians, and the natural world.

Today, as a full-time photographer, my goal with each photograph is to create a work of art. My aim is to reach into the internal beauty—the essence—of each of my subjects.

I am member of the StarFruit Productions team, photographer for The Circus Arts Conservatory, and co-director of the Circus Lives Project. My photos included in publications such as The White Tops, Circus Fans of America Magazine; Sailor Circus and Cirque Des Voix promotional materials (Circus Arts Conservatory); UniverSoul Circus social media; Circus Lives—online gallery; Artemis Literary Journal, 2022 edition; Sarasota Magazine; and a book called Tattoos, Telling the Secrets of the Soul, by Allan Dayhoff, DMin. And my pictures featured in exhibitions including Liquid Arts Venue 4—online gallery; 620 Gallery (St. Petersburg, Florida); Candlelight Jazz Gallery (Trenton, New Jersey). My portraits used by more than 200 people for their Facebook profile photos.

https://www.lennieduensingphotography.com/