|
|
Shanxing Wang was born in Qi county, Jinzhong, Shanxi province, China in 1965. In 1991, he moved to the U.S. to pursue a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He began reading and writing poetry in 2002 while teaching Engineering at Rutgers University. His first book, Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoem, 2005), was the winner of the 2006 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. He lives and writes in Queens, New York.
|
 |
J Integral Today I am sick of the abundance of I in my story, capitalized or not, because the voice of this I, in its futile effort to win its case by sheer numbers, is chaotic, impotent, equivocal, and contradictory. Instead I go to others’ stories, to hunt the specter of the hidden form of my story, lurking in the hundred-years-old narrative forest of how to say I I meet K on each page I read. We unite in words over and over. K and I. For example, kith and kin, drink, pick, kiss, kink, kill. You get the picture of the state of the affair. Together we are a given in every story. But X is a rare species, X always wears a dark mist on his face if he appears on the pages at all. As if from weariness after the long solitary journey across the alphabet table of, or mistrust of the words. I know X and I joined each other in no less words. Like Xi’an. Or existence, matrix, climax, anxiety, exile, extinction, Quixote, sphinx. X and I stand side-by-side in this contextless heap of words, 75% of the time. Very encouraging. Why can’t we always show up together in stories? I turn my math books to look for him, to solve for him At 4:30AM on Monday X phoned me that K had died unexpectedly while playing his violin in Stockholm. Two days later X fled the city too and secluded herself in a remote monastery I say she when I say K, and he X, or vise versa, as if I am positive about which should be he and which should be she. But in my speech I hopelessly misuse he as she, and she as he. Because in my mother tongue both she and he are pronounced as Ta, with identical syllable and intonation. Or I have always been confounded by the similarities and differences between she and he. From pure appearance, she is different from he only by a serpent-like letter S. So she is the sed he and he is the unsed she. S. The bond between he and she. The sine wavy suture sewing he and she. I ride the surging wave to catch our lost fish and wonder who is in the air and who is in the water, she or he. I glide in both air and water because their interface has no thickness I write S down in various fonts, on the margin of the pages, to fill the blank space of my story. And I find myself walking alone on the deserted, crooked, willowy pavement, which consists of 5 S-shaped segments of different lengths but smoothly connected at ends, which circumscribes the quiet man-made lake in the park of the ancient city, and along which I walked every week with K and X, along which we talked about the names of the fish jumping out of the water. Those fish jumping ten feet above the water. We were so fascinated by the jumping fish that time and again we wanted to become three big fish playing with the stagnant water and the air saturated with the fragrance of willows and dewy grasses I stretch, compress, twist S into different proportions, as if holding a newly discovered character. And I recognize the symbol of the line integral along the curve J in the K-X-I space, First appeared in 580 Split, Issue 6, 2004
Probes of Near-Field Optical Microscopy Who is speaking? First appeared in Brooklyn Rail, May 2005 |
|
, which perfectly approximates the accumulation in my memory of our hundred-time-walk. J is short for Jiaotong in my mother tongue, which literally translates into traffic, communication, and transport. J contracts from January to June, quietly longing for the scribbled scrambled miraculous spring. J immediately succeeds the severely handicapped I en route to K and X. No matter in what route, clockwise or counterclockwise, no matter what analytical method I try, be it table of standard integrals, integration by substitution, series expansion, Simpson’s rule, or Gaussian quadrature, no matter what software I use, be it Maple, Mathematica or Matlab, no matter what programming language I use, be it Fortran, Basic, or C++, no matter how many times I carry out my calculation, this integral always gives me the same result, that is 1980. I realize it depends only on our coordinates in space and time, fixed in my bleak memory park, since the path-independence of this integral is guaranteed by the fact that the integrand is the total differential of the mysterious function F, and this lake of my memory is a simply-connected domain and its water is never ruffled