Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
nihil obstat?
read and prophesy, he said; patrick white, joyride nor sorry astride —
of a juniper berry and clove-wing heart, cradled in pink coral from the reef
of his weathered eyes and rescue and leaving — that solitary line a bouts-rimés
what desert-fat(er-figural nothings;
but bobbing whispers, no wheel
the triple-nozzled lamp filled to its brim
and eventually, his backward glance and sigh
* This poem first appeared in the literary journal "Dear Sir". Its title, “nihil obstat?”, meaning “nothing stands in the way” in Latin, was written after I encountered White’s 1976 novel, A Fringe of Leaves. This poem is a novel-to-poem idiomatic/ekphrastic translation that experiments with hybridity and transformation, in an attempt to explore the difficulties of textual equivalence.
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