Perennial Counterpart, page 1
Copyright © 2026 by Yongyu Chen
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
ISBN: 978-1-643-62310-8
Cover photograph: Gabby Woo, 2024
Design and composition by Kit Schluter
Typeset in Jacquarda Bastarda 9
and Adobe Caslon Pro
Cataloging-in-publication data is available
from the Library of Congress
Nightboat Books
New York
www.nightboat.org
If the world no longer went on as it does now between man and woman, between truth and lie, like truth now and lie now
If all that went to the devil
If you set out afresh the sum to which you attach value and of which you take account
If you were an airman and, without quibbling, flew your arc, if you only gave news, reports, no more the story of all that together, of yourself and another and a third
Then, if you were whole and no longer wounded, injured, addicted to purity and vengeance . . .
Then, when you no longer think that things must improve “in the framework of the given”, that the rich must no longer be rich and the poor no longer be poor, the innocent ought no longer to be condemned and the guilty executed . . .
When at last comes at last
Then
Then jump up once again and tear down the old disgraceful order. Then be different, so that the world shall change, so that it shall change direction, at last! Then embark upon it!
—Ingeborg Bachmann, from “The Thirtieth Year” translated by Michael Bullock
Contents
untitled
05.22.23
Superject, Undercommons
Pendulum
Pasolini and Callas
Theory of Mesh
The Year of Getting Closer to Steam
05.24.23
Consequential Maneuver
Vézelay
Late May, Late June
Plenum
Truant
Macerations
Squall Path
Nessuno (Not One)
Monarchy of the North
Knowledge
Poetics
Self-Portrait at 26
Mouse Song
Flightpath
Tombpetals
Listening
05.11.23
Snakeskin
Ithaca-Thiais
Friendship as a Way of Life
Articulation of Solace
05.31.23
Chryselephantine, Conviction
untitled
untitled
notes
Unintelligible to the end. To the end,
unintelligible.
You will not always write. Or‚ you will always write.
But when I’m dead I will write? Then?
You will not always write.
At some point
some point
at some point the poems will get
better. Then
it will be your expectations, not the poems
that are lacking. Then
you will not write.
You feel
there are other moments. Still there are
other moments, you feel. As if
you could stretch out into the mess of heat
around you, access it.
The first of the series, another series.
Rain removes its head. Who is here?
Frost squeezes out of the sleeve. New moments.
Pull apart the shell—you in general.
If replaced the poem.
You will always write.
05.22.23
Rapidly becoming sick, blanching in the hour before the heat—I am cold in the wind, warmly expanding in the shadow.
It is a pleasure to walk behind you—into a room where I will spend the summer. Be undemanding, diffident even, knowing I can always stand in the space behind the door.
My body will fuse to the cool counter, seeking the oil & pans.
Flat space arches your blood.
My eye. Through its wavering aperture, your head. White foam.
I see the white foam of your sleep cross the shallow grid of morning.
My head, close to the window’s vertical slats. Or on the floor by the shoes, looking out from where the room begins.
Bitter & acrid—cooked, the tall grasses will pin down our vanity for ten more years.
Enough time.
You blended the stone with the water. When it cooled, the particulates settled at the bottom of the glass. It was drinkable again. Stone leaving water, they will not mix.
You don’t have to think about the brain. It thinks. It settles.
Superject, Undercommons
It’s May. I
become accidental,
When
can I visit, you
can say no. Wearing dresses, drinking
clear summer wine, loosening
the petrification
from the spark. In the city
I leave
the movie theater alone. Desire
is the layer
of cells right in front
of my face, a
brain, it’s May. I read
the poem we wrote. Leaves
of watermelon growing from the poem we wrote. We wrote You will be part of your friend’s face. You will be part of your friend’s face. You will be part of your friend’s face.
//
When I
don’t know the word for
what I’m
doing with
you what
am I doing with you?
When
I don’t know
where the mistake is
I know
I can just make one. Nave,
clerestory. Why. By
next year I would like to
not
be here. Nor I. Nor be. We
eat in the rain. Experiment
in living. Experiment in living. Experiment in living.
Partager—in one word, both divide and share.
Deleuze said—write and instead of is. The question is Relation not Being.
Relation not Being.
Antineocolonial modes. Abolition of a society
where this society was possible.
Old friends this is my new friend. It will never make sense. Queerness,
something is sharing
us. Yes I got you a gift, no you don’t have to open it.
There was a hole in a garden on Prentiss, near Beacon. It rained recently,
I wondered if the rain washed it
away, should I go check.
For you.
I build a library for a child.
Pendulum
It does not seem like anything separates us, or will. Always will I
love your work as well. In the winding of space & time don’t you think summer opens tunnels. Won’t there be tunnels against the winding,
dear.
Tunnels, cutting through the sweet dried loaf pressed with flowers, through liquid ivy, through Libra, most trustworthy of constellations. The entire cliffside overgrown with purple ramps, tunneled. When you are cloaked in an aura of pain, I will have the right to step behind you. Through one of many tunnels. To not be mesmerized by your expression’s constant altering. And help you upright. The inside
of the tunnel—I remember it buzzing ripe with condensation.
The winding, the tunnels, the nets (by the shore, the house covered in nets, in the musk of nets)—
it does not matter which I love more, all traces of the same endless process.
I write: ball of flesh with, at its center, a cool, blue liquid.
I write: in the tenebrous valley my back looks like a larger heart held up by white sticks.
I never imagined we wouldn’t be friends. Grey wool of the binding cloth patrolled by drops of blood.
On the windy day I tie the scarf around my neck tight, tighter. Its ends brush, through my shirt, my nipples.
In the summer, suddenly—I see traces of a world of ice. Beams, structures, an entire shadow knowledge not inside summer but
involved with its motion, at the still point of summer.
A great frost.
Pasolini and Callas
When their faces were next to each other they looked older than they were, more sensitive.
When the right person is next to me I can see the abyss.
The creation of a secret. Secretum—meaning
also separation. I
can’t see the abyss, I can’t. I can’t see the abyss. Green flowers grow from bread.
Something very wrong. Everything could be so easy. Unlike this.
The middle of the day is almost night.
I know where I am by the smell
of flowers. When the wind blows I think I’m somewhere else, I recalibrate. Being not always
where I think I am, where I am
thickening. Aster, disaster. Aster,
disaster. Bliss.
Your gaze on this page.
Line after line. Each their own length. Furrows. Ease.
How easy everything could be. The ease of speaking with the right person, suddenly, even if we’ve never spoken before. Don’t need to think, no need for will. At each point of the rocky shore, desert and sea melding into a singularly gentle, glowering blankness. A secret. (A, meaning not one but
other than one. A.) Anyone at all. Pasolini and Callas on the beach.
What does the next word look like to each word. Trees fruiting through the tomb’s open kitchen window, pushing in. The fruit invisible. The hard shell.
05.17.22, letter to Yun Qin
Theory of Mesh
There has to be a part of nonpossession that’s still relation.
There has to be a purity without closedness. Purity
almost without consciousness, loneliness, pure energy, a pure
person, S—I hope to sustain always an energy that’s very pure.
I had spent a year trying to write only in long lines.
I thought, I will write a Lucie Brock-Broido line but even
longer. I will write a poem obsessed
with nights in fields. Duration. Thought. Then
I read a book by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. I realized
what I was writing was a Mei-mei Berssenbrugge line. When
things like this happen I
know why I’m writing. Theory
of mesh. I came back
to New York. There was a collection of Rachel
Kushner’s essays in every bookstore. In each one I reread
her essay on Duras. Things happened to Duras, Kushner writes,
that she never experienced. The story of Duras and the older
Chinese lover, for instance, a legend which, having ripened
during her whole life, finally
became true in The Lover. Her best book. Which means she had to
write it until it was. Is. As,
I think, does Kushner. In her novels, with
her life, in her own way. As do I. It’s why I love her essay. In
Brooklyn I was visiting H’s place & their roommate C told us
about Leonora Carrington. In C’s print
of And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, who,
C asks, is the Minotaur’s daughter. I think it’s the dancer
the dogs see, I love the dogs. C says, the Minotaur’s daughter could be
everything we see after we look away. Maybe. That
much. Looking away is everything. Maybe. At the center
of looking away, being gone
is everything. Maybe. Leonora H. Kushner. Mei-mei
C. Duras. It was true: I didn’t come here to not fall in love. Writes Kushner
of New York. In the mesh
who is she talking to. In a dream
my family photos were taped onto photos
of the distant star and then, as the dream
reached its point of inflection, I realized the star could see us
through our backsides, and,
somehow, S was part of it, S was part of the dream, then part
of the star, part of the seeing,
by being the one outside it, the one
element of waking. In her note at the end
of Empathy Berssenbrugge writes—I was living alone
in northern New Mexico. Writes—I met Georgia
O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin. Writes—I wanted to feminize scientific language
and philosophic language.
Writes—The slow arc of the sun
across “empty” land became long, poetic lines. Friendship
as a way of life.
Being-together-alone.
And then we saw the daughter of the Minotaur.
The key to all the work up to this point.
for Yun Qin
The Year of Getting Closer to Steam
Smooth leg, deep dream. When the house is empty you come to the dining room & see
the changes.
What you feel, you feel,
is the sheath.
One year you did not visit your parents, which made it three years you did not try.
On your birthday they came. They took you to the rocky beach with dolphins in the water. And you asked father what those bushes were. Heavy, pink flowers,
wild roses, eglantine.
With my friend I talk, we talk, we keep talking.
It is generational in the dusk, like we will pass the conversation to two others, like we even
will pick who. Like we will implant in them the feelings.
They will be this conversation’s finishers. You can’t leave.
But how can I leave? How, how can I leave?
The rules are empty, they are the giant, empty space.
The bath is filled with cool water, speaking back & forth with your body.
Remove your ideas. In the blinks you remake your winter organs into fish, you make
each vein, you make sure you don’t die, even in the version. And even though
you forget the gills you do not correct yourself.
Mathematical proof. Shiny stones.
Cook the thorn.
05.24.23
When you look down your face recedes. It is a pleasure to not follow you then into the core of your body. A pleasure to stand aside,
by your recession. We sit with your friend, in early summer, at the blue café, his face pale & transparent like a medusa. You lean
in. And recede in the eager waves of his speech. I recede, parallel to you. I do not learn the essential things. I do not
move my hands in circles on the wet surface of the essential. I watch the mark on his face, stable & changing. Climbing
like a cliff. I will never know. I am not a secret either. Earlier, he says, when you painted in Chicago, his studio next to yours, he saw you
through the doorway, walking to & from the canvas. He saw it as an intensity. When he took it out of himself it was
an intensity. It surprised him.
for Gabby
Consequential Maneuver
An action, imperceptible in the moment.
Diffuse, gentle. Later, a giant form
overhanging all else. Silent
in the background’s
dampness, weaving-in between the lake
& rain, noncommittal, keeping track
of their differences.
Rain strikes the lake. It rises
in ridges of level, each ridge in four
faces. Could, can. Now can’t. Again,
can. Lake
freezes from surface
down. Action
complicates.
Ice,
horizontally & vertically,
makes
different marks in me, the second darker
in magnitude, closer
to knowledge. Something
maneuvers
in between.
Not action. Maneuvers
between the actions.
I hold onto old connections. Don’t you?
This word makes no sense in the evening.
It is said—knowledge is discontinuous droplets. Clouds of ice & rain form a carapace around each droplet. In the cloudcover, enough space for rivulets to branch.
What if—when lightning strikes
against each facet of cloud’s defense, it burns up
immediately against the spiritless neck of cloud. Clear, scentless smoke.
Air, filling with humidity, is like snow melt.
I do not think you will be an artist. No.
There is a force in you.
It breaks through.
In you it takes a further step.
Vézelay
after, as Georges Bataille
The wall of summer pitted with walnut shells. Clawed flanks of vine. No windows in the kitchen. A pure sound as storm fell—comfort, the evulsion of, bright forms in the dark.
I had developed a nocturnal vision.
I wished—I had the strength to write, to you, in the form of a list, the people I hated because of my love for you. Very short list. Unknown,
white flutters. Long ago, O told me, they fell asleep, alone in a summer bed filled with their partner’s books . . . I see the lightning
cut into the pages between the books, I see what the memory refuses, obsession, anonymity. Most of us.
In the bedroom I close the blinds.
Can you explain this.
Unhappiness is a core like a crystal, a heavy polar axis. It does not make me happier. When I left Paris for the country I thought I had failed, in my life, to make my fear understood.
Friendship. Are there incompatibilities.
Even the grass on the stone today begging for newer, loftier morals.
I don’t mean rules for action. I don’t mean that.
Window divided in two by light, wall divided into feelings. The clouds are so dark. The thunderstorm is an illumination but only for faces. So I see only the faces very clear between the salted blades of grass.
